THE 
MAN OF NAZARETH 



BY 
FREDERICK LINCOLN ANDERSON, D.D. 

PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION IN 
NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION 



£fotu fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1914 

All rights reserved 



Copyright, 1914 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 10 14. 



OCT 15 1914 

'CI.A387033 



THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO 

Hg Jfcttljrc, <SaI«Hlja Attbwami, 

FEARLESS PATRIOT 

HONORED LEADER IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 

MASTER AND EMINENT TEACHER OF THE ART OF PREACHING 

BEARING CHOICE LITERARY FRUIT IN OLD AGE 

AN ALTOGETHER WHOLESOME MAN 



FOREWORD 

In writing this book, I have had the ordinarily 
intelligent man constantly in mind, and have 
tried to answer some of the questions about 
Jesus, which have often arisen in his thinking 
but have rarely passed his lips. But while writ- 
ing for the people, I have never forgotten the 
experts, a fact which they will quickly perceive, 
if they will do me the honor to penetrate to the 
core of the volume. I have tried to observe the 
rules of the critical game, have practically used 
only the first three gospels, and, even in them, 
have clearly differentiated the sources. I am 
ready to defend my position in the scholarly 
arena. 

This book is not an investigation, but a state- 
ment of the results of fourteen years of research, 
put forth in popular form. There are therefore 
few critical arguments, few citations from schol- 
arly authorities and not many quotations. Con- 
sequently, also, I have not failed to use the con- 



V1U FOREWORD 

elusions, so laboriously won, for the quickening 
of faith and courage. As the readers will soon 
see, I belong to no party, but have attempted to 
investigate independently, to make a fearless 
search for truth, and have drawn the picture of 
Jesus which the facts, as I see them, give me. 
My whole attitude has been historical rather than 
theological. The final result will probably fully 
satisfy nobody, and that may be the best test 
of its real worth. 

This is not a Life of Jesus, nor a summary of 
his teachings, nor a mere character sketch. It 
is rather a treatment of the most important prob- 
lems about Jesus and his career, and that so far 
as possible from the viewpoint of Jesus himself. 
I am aware of the boldness of the attempt, but 
feel that we may reverently penetrate to the 
very heart of Jesus. Indeed, it is doubtful if 
we can truly know him in any other way. 

It should be understood that Chapter I is 
merely preliminary, inserted to give a general view 
of the subject and to create an appetite for some- 
thing more definite and detailed. In my own 
mind, Chapters III and IV constitute the prin- 
cipal contribution of the book, and are the real 



FOREWORD IS 

reason for its publication, though Chapters VII 
and IX may possibly rank with them. 

Of course, it would be impossible for me to 
give a list of all the books which have influenced 
my thought on this great subject. The following 
authors should, however, be mentioned as pe- 
culiarly responsible for the final form and indeed 
some of the phrases of the book. For the first 
chapter, I am much indebted to a sermon on 
The Light of the World by my friend, Rev. James 
A. Francis of Boston, and to Harnack's Chris- 
tianity and History. My greatest helpers for the 
most important chapters were Von Soden in his 
Die Wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, and Holtz- 
mann in his Das Messianische Bewusstsein Jesu. 
For the chapter on the teaching, Clarke's The 
Ideal of Jesus proved valuable. For the discus- 
sion of the character, I must mention Bushnell's 
The Character of Jesus, still inspiring though 
from the older point of view, and a little book, 
published since I began to write, Fosdick's The 
Manhood of the Master, which is sure to prove of 
lasting worth. 

For kindly and yet thorough criticism, my 
thanks are due to two of my colleagues, Professor 



X FOREWORD 

Richard M. Vaughan and Mr. James P. Berkeley, 
and, especially, to my father and mother, who 
have also labored in many other ways to help me 
in the production of this book. 

Frederick Lincoln Anderson. 

Newton Centre, Mass. 
April 30, IQ14. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Power Behind the History . . i 
II. The Situation in Which Jesus Found 

Himself 23 

III. How did Jesus Come to Believe Himself 

the Messiah? 34 

IV. How Jesus Handled Messianism . . 60 
V. How Jesus Handled Legalism ... 97 

VI. Jesus' Positive Teaching in 

VII. Jesus' Work and His View of its Future 137 

VIII. The Character of Jesus ..... 166 

LX. The Finality of Jesus 209 

Appendix 219 

Index 223 



THE MAN OF NAZARETH 



THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

CHAPTER I 

THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 

Almost two thousand years ago there appeared 
a man, who changed the course of human his- 
tory, who, above any other person living or dead, 
dominates the thought and feeling of our modern 
world. The most intelligent and progressive part 
of mankind date their letters, count time, from 
the year of his birth. 

Yet herein lies the deepest mystery, for he had 
none of the external advantages which men 
think necessary to such vast influence. He came 
of a despised race. He was born of the peasant 
class. He lived nearly all his life in an obscure 
town of a frontier province. He never had what 
either his Graeco-Roman or Jewish contem- 
poraries would have called an education. It 
cannot be proved that he ever read any book 
except the Old Testament, or that he ever studied 
the philosophers of Greece. He grew up under 



2 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the blighting shadow of a fanatical and bigoted 
religiosity. He never traveled a hundred miles 
from his home; nor, until his fate was practically 
sealed, did he ever see any country other than 
his own. He had no money or any desire to 
make money. He had no powerful or cultivated 
friends. He eschewed politics. He championed 
no popular social reforms. He stirred up no class 
conflict. He never led an army, or wrote a 
book, or founded a school. He never invoked 
the aid of art, music or literature. He either was 
shut out from all the avenues that in the experi- 
ence of men lead to greatness, or he refused to use 
them. His whole public activity extended over 
little more than three years, quite possibly two, 
perhaps only one. He was only thirty-five or six at 
most when he died. His teachings antagonized the 
religious traditions, the cherished political hopes 
of his people, the interests of the higher classes, 
and all the ingrained selfishness of humanity. 
He continually disappointed his followers and 
even his dearest friends. He was finally betrayed 
by one of his own disciples, and was crucified 
between two robbers, suffering the most shame- 
ful death known to that age. 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 3 

And now the mystery begins. He had hardly 
stepped out into public life, when all felt that 
some extraordinary person had come upon the 
scene. In a few weeks he had focused the atten- 
tion of the nation on himself. Multitudes hung 
upon his lips. The leading men of the Jews soon 
found it necessary to journey to Galilee to op- 
pose this young man, who was like to steal their 
authority over night. The crowds began to think 
him another Elijah or Jeremiah, and even to 
wonder sometimes whether he might not be the 
Messiah. Contrary to rule, his most familiar 
friends, his daily table-companions, were more 
impressed than those who knew him less inti- 
mately. They accepted him as their teacher, 
prophet and king. They found no stain of sin, 
no shadow of impurity in him. They hailed 
him as Messiah, although he was so different 
from what they expected the Messiah to be, 
and by that name they meant nothing less than 
that he was God's special Representative on 
earth, the Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
the Bringer of Salvation and the Final Judge of 
Men. After his death, it did not seem unnatural 
to them that he should have risen from the dead, 



4 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

nor incongruous with what they knew of him 
that he should be sitting at God's right hand. 
They confessed him as the Good Shepherd, the 
Light of the World, the Prince of Life, the Son 
of God. They said that they had beheld his 
glory, glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father, 
full of grace and truth. And soon a multitude 
of Jews and heathen, wise and fools, declared 
that he was the strength of their life, the Savior 
of their souls, and that they had seen the glory 
of God in his face. "This fact, which is as plain 
as day," says Professor Harnack, "is unique in 
history, and demands that the personality which 
lies behind it should be regarded as unique." 

These wonderful ascriptions of an almost di- 
vine power and glory were soon matched by the 
facts of history. The impulse of this powerful 
personality began to make itself felt throughout 
the world. Within two months after his death, 
three thousand men and women enthusiastically 
joined his cause in the very city in which he had 
been executed as a criminal. His influence ex- 
tended in ever widening circles. It leaped the 
barrier of a narrow Judaism and entered upon a 
career of conquest in the Gentile world. His 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 5 

followers gladly suffered imprisonment, torture 
and death for his sake. The bitterest persecu- 
tions only fanned the flame and scattered the 
conflagration. The spiritual enthusiasm spread 
like a prairie fire till the whole Roman Empire 
was ablaze. The ablest and most thorough of 
the early persecutors was struck down, and be- 
came the most devoted of his followers, the most 
successful missionary of the faith. Within thirty- 
five years of Jesus' death, a Roman emperor was 
burning Christians at the stake in his own gar- 
dens in the distant capital of the world. Jesus 
had against him the power, the culture, the reli- 
gion, the pride, the self-interest, the prejudices, 
the traditions and all the selfish passions of the 
greatest, the richest, the most magnificent civiliza- 
tion that man up to that time had produced. 
But after a two hundred and fifty year contest 
in which all these tremendous forces fought with 
the energy of despair, the Roman Empire at 
last surrendered. The Galilean peasant had 
conquered. Emperors, at least nominally Chris- 
tian, occupied the seat of Nero and Diocletian. 
The completeness of the triumph is strikingly 
evidenced by the facts that the priceless marbles 



6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

which once adorned the throne-room of the ruth- 
less persecutor, Domitian, on the Palatine, are 
today the pride of the Church of Jesus in the 
valley below the Capitoline, and that the most 
magnificent Christian cathedral in the world 
stands in the very gardens once lighted by the 
fires of Nero's victims. 

By simply associating them with himself, Jesus 
changed the humble fishermen of Galilee from 
ordinary men into the leaders of a new and world- 
wide movement, and has made them famous for 
all time. More people read Peter, John and 
Matthew today than read Homer, Virgil or 
Shakespeare. We call our children John, James, 
Philip and Thomas, and the name of the mother 
of Jesus is the commonest of all. A Johnson 
has been President of the United States. An 
Andrewson is writing these lines. The Jamesons, 
the Matthews, the Phillipses, the Thompsons and 
the Petersons are a great host. These obscure 
disciples are honored by cities like St. John, 
St. Paul and St. Petersburg; while the most 
beautiful and stately buildings of Christendom 
bear their names, St. Peter's at Rome, St. Paul's 
in London and St. John the Divine in New York. 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 7 

It is interesting to note that these names are 
beginning to invade India, China and Japan. 

No character of the past exerts so direct and 
vast an influence on the present world as Jesus. 
The movement to which his personality gave the 
initial impulse has outlived all contemporary gov- 
ernments, philosophies and social systems, has en- 
dured all the vicissitudes of nineteen centuries, 
has crossed all the oceans, has invaded every con- 
tinent, is strongest in the world's foremost nations 
and never was more intelligent, more spiritual, 
more powerful or more hopeful than it is today. 

One of the most remarkable features of Chris- 
tianity is her faculty of self-criticism and self- 
purification. In this she seems almost to repro- 
duce the functions of a living thing in throwing 
off what is useless and effete. The impulse and 
the power are from within. Thus she renewed 
herself in the Reformation, and again in the Wes- 
leyan revival. In fact the process is continually 
going on, not only in the body as a whole, but 
in each living section of it. Outworn forms are 
cast aside, ancient traditions fade, doctrines are 
modified. Christianity is always digging deeper 



8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

foundations for her faith. The apologetic which 
once satisfied has begun to seem superficial and 
inadequate. Much she once thought essential, 
she now sees was not the essence after all. Ever 
deeper, deeper, deeper she goes, until she founds 
her faith on the granite rock of reality. This 
means progress and true growth. It is not the 
sacrifice of faith, but a truer valuation and ap- 
preciation of it. 

Christianity is also constantly broadening her 
outlook. More and more she sees with Paul that 
all things are hers, because she is Christ's and 
Christ is God's. She breaks the shell of Judaism, 
she travels from Asia to Europe. She survives 
the dissolution of the Roman Empire through 
the conversion of the northern barbarians. She 
finds herself able to cut loose from the papacy, 
and at last from alliance with the state. She 
crosses the ocean to a new world. Finally she 
begins to take in earnest the missionary call and 
the missionary hope, and is now seeing what is 
really the beginning of a universal break-up of 
heathenism. She recognizes the opportunity for 
intensive as well as extensive growth. She lays 
claim to the secular as well as to the religious 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 9 

sphere. She takes all life as her empire, and looks 
forward to the day, when not only the inner life 
and the home, but business, politics, education, 
art, music, literature and the whole social order 
shall be Christian. Thus she strengthens and 
nourishes her hope. Her visions grow larger and 
more glorious with the ongoing years. Her task 
seems ever greater and more fundamental and 
more essential to the good of men. She realizes 
herself as the Light of the World. 

She is the surer of this, for she finds in herself 
an amazing ability to adapt herself to new situa- 
tions. Beginning as a simple, unreasoning Jewish 
faith, she was able to present herself to an age 
dominated by Stoicism and Neoplatonism, and 
to wear what seemed to the men of that day a 
familiar face. When Scholasticism came in, she 
was a Scholastic, and at the Renaissance still 
knew how to be in fashion. So the history has 
gone on until, in our own age, she seems to be 
thriving on biblical criticism, the conceptions 
of the new science and the philosophy of evolu- 
tion. And yet she is always herself. In all these 
different forms, she is seeking and finding some- 
thing to round out and complete her truth. 



IO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Fashions in philosophy come, and fashions in 
philosophy go, but she goes on forever. From 
each fashion she gains some advantage, but casts 
the fashions aside, when they no longer help her 
to make herself known to men. Just now she 
is getting ready to emphasize her pragmatic side; 
and she is strong there. She feels sure that no 
discovery of truth can ever disconcert or harm 
her, for she knows that in her experience of union 
with Jesus and communion with God she has 
touched the rock bottom of life. Thus she is 
certain of ultimate victory. She knows that 
when the world gets through with all its experi- 
ments, it is bound to come back to her and her 
experience of God through Jesus. 

Our whole point is this, that all this power of 
self-purification, all this capacity for profounder 
insight and growing vision, all this adaptability to 
human hearts and minds in every age, all this stir 
of hope and certainty of faith, in short, all this 
actuality and potency of life she constantly refers 
to the spirit and power of Jesus working in her. 
In him and him alone she recognizes the source 
and impulse of her vital energy. 

Jesus' influence on our own age may also be 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY II 

seen in the fact that he lays hold of men today 
just as truly and wonderfully as he laid hold of 
Paul on the road to Damascus, or Augustine in 
the garden at Milan. These marvels never cease, 
and science and sociology are at last taking them 
seriously. Professor James in his Varieties of 
Religious Experience and Begbie in his Twice 
Born Men have called the world's attention again 
to this common, world-wide phenomenon. Such 
conversions occur in Chicago and Pekin, in Lon- 
don and Madras, in Madagascar and New Zea- 
land, in Greenland and on the Congo; and not 
only among the degenerates of our own civiliza- 
tion and those sunk in heathen superstition, but 
also among the educated and prosperous. I some- 
times contemplate rivaling Begbie with a book 
on Twice Bom Respectables. I have a super- 
abundance of material for it. But Jesus lays 
hold of John and Andrew none the less surely 
than he does of Paul. Though in such cases the 
experience is quieter and not calculated to sum- 
mon and fix the attention of men, yet the life 
is just as truly moulded and shaped, just as 
thoroughly, though not as strikingly, changed. 
There are millions of Christians of this type, 



12 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

and they do not yield in devotion or faith to 
those of the other sort. 

With one voice they all testify, men of every 
temperament, of every age, of every race and 
of every social condition, that Jesus has drawn 
them to himself, has made them moral victors, 
has led them into communion with the Father, 
has given unity to their lives, has furnished them 
with a new and infinitely worthy motive and 
purpose, has filled them with love to their fellows, 
has inspired in them the ideals of a new humanity 
in a new society, and has put into their hearts 
the faith that overcomes the world. 

This life relation with Jesus his followers count 
their greatest blessing, their most sacred treasure, 
the unspeakable gift. And, when occasion pre- 
sents itself, they offer an indisputable proof of 
the value they set upon it. "All that a man hath 
will he give for his life," is an ancient proverb, 
and it is nearly the truth. But there are some 
things more precious than life, and this blessing 
which Jesus gives his followers is one of them. 
Rather than seem untrue to him the Giver, today, 
as during all the centuries of the past, they will 
endure supreme tortures and death in its most 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 3 

dreadful forms. Doughty, the English University 
explorer of Arabia, so radical in his views that 
many old-fashioned saints would almost deny 
him the Christian name, spent years absolutely 
alone among the fanatical Musselmen, but, unlike 
other western travelers in those lands, he scorned 
to hide the fact that he was a Christian, and 
openly approached the very walls of Mecca. 
His life was in daily danger. The horrid bigotry 
of the Arabs made every night's sleep a peril, 
and yet, as he says, he could never make up his 
mind "to deny the dear name of Jesus," even 
when threatened with imminent and instant 
death. 

The Christian boys of Uganda in Africa pre- 
ferred to burn at the stake rather than renounce 
their lately found Savior, and they died singing 
amid the flames. The followers of Jesus in 
Madagascar allowed themselves to be thrown over 
precipices to the rocks below, although one com- 
promising word would have saved them. Whole 
families of humble Russian peasants, after years 
of harassing persecution, have tramped the 
thousand miles to Siberia across the barren plains 
in the face of bitter winds and, after suffering all 



14 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

privations, have starved to death in proof of the 
value they set upon the light and life which 
Jesus had brought to their souls. And in our 
century, ten thousand Chinese men, women and 
children laid down their lives in the anti-christian 
uprisings in China. One word of repudiation of 
Jesus, only a word, would have given them life, 
but that word they would not speak. The allied 
troops found the whited bones of hundreds of 
Christians in the palace gardens of Prince Chuang 
in Pekin, mute and glorious witnesses of the power 
and blessing of Jesus in our own age. Indeed, 
there is no living king, emperor or leader, who 
today could summon so large a host of devoted 
volunteers, ready to live or die for him, as Jesus. 
The power of Jesus in society continually in- 
creases. He somehow created a new moral and 
spiritual atmosphere in the world and a new type 
of human character. Sins, that stalked un- 
ashamed before he lived and died, have indeed 
survived, but they have never recovered caste, 
and some of them are now almost unknown in 
Christian lands. In Jesus mankind made a dis- 
tinct moral advance and has ever since, despite 
all waverings and backslidings, lived on a higher 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 5 

plane. Lecky has well said, "The simple record 
of three short years of active life has done more 
to regenerate and soften mankind than all the 
disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhor- 
tations of moralists. In the character of its 
Founder, the church has an enduring principle of 
regeneration." With Jesus' insistence on the 
seriousness of life and his appreciation of the 
infinite value of a single human soul, there was 
ushered in a new civilization, rightly called Chris- 
tian. With the elevation of woman and the pas- 
sion for purity, both originating with him, there 
was created the Christian home. Just before Jesus 
was born, liberty died in the Graeco-Roman 
world, but he gave it a new reason for existence, 
and, more than any other, he is responsible for 
the modern revival of democracy. It is his spirit, 
which has abolished slavery and duelling, which 
frowns on cruelty and oppression, which is be- 
hind all the forces of justice, mercy and brother- 
hood, which is making unrelenting war on all the 
forces of evil. He is at the bottom of much of 
our social unrest. His spirit stirs us to bring in 
the kingdom of righteousness and joy and peace. 
He has entered into the warp and woof of our 



1 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

social life. As Bushnell says, "It were easier to 
untwist all the beams of light in the sky and to 
separate and expunge one of the primary colors, 
than to get the character of Jesus, which is the 
true gospel, out of the world." 

His utterly unexpected triumphs in recent 
years nourish the faith of his followers that the 
day is approaching when he shall rule universally 
in the hearts of men. His cause seems to be 
gaining an almost irresistible momentum. His 
final victory is changing from being a matter of 
religious faith into being a matter of rational 
probability. These advances are inextricably in- 
tertwined with selfish motives, and disappoint 
those idealists who do not understand that the 
history of all progress is like that of a flowing 
tide, whose new high water marks alternate 
with ebbings. Recently the incoming waves have 
reached points hitherto unknown. A universal, 
idealistic, democratic, essentially Christian move- 
ment seems to be encircling the globe, breaking 
out here and there only to be suppressed. All 
mature observers rejoice in the new high records 
of progress, and understand that the retrogressions 
are merely temporary. The next wave is bound 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 7 

to go higher still. 1 The dethronement of that 
old serpent, Abdul Hamid, by the Young Turks 
in 1909 and the reign of the original Committee 
of Order and Progress in the Ottoman Empire 
was an event of the highest and most cheering 
significance. The national rising against despo- 
tism in effete Persia and the proof that thousands 
there were willing to die, as they said, "for the 
sweet name of liberty," was beyond the faith 
of the most confirmed optimists. To her shame 
England has helped Russia put out that light, 
but Persia and the world can never be the same 
again. The appeal of the Japanese Minister of 
Education to the Christian missionaries to help 
solve the moral problems of the Empire was 
plainly a turn in the tide. Most amazing of all 
was the mighty change in China. The West is 
still dumbfounded at the thought of a great 
Chinese Republic, and most fittingly its provi- 
sional President was a Christian. Who could 
have believed it ten years ago? Today the 
Crescent flaps feebly in the breeze behind its last 

1 Since these sentences were in print, the general European 
war of 1914 has broken out. The author, however, on mature 
reflection sees no reason for changing the wording. Often the 
greatest ebb precedes the greatest flow. 



1 8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

breastworks in Europe. The old, corrupt Mo- 
hammedanism is sinking to irremediable ruin. 
Whether the Young Turks can create a new 
Mohammedanism, more in accord with Chris- 
tian ideals and the thought of Jesus, remains to 
be seen. It is the only hope the Levantine world 
has of avoiding Christian domination. All this 
is partial, stained with sordidness, baseness and 
blood, subject to temporary reverses, and yet it 
is a wave of idealism, the pulse of a new life, 
the splendid promise of a better world, and its 
ultimate source is Jesus. His teaching and his 
spirit irresistibly press the nations forward. He 
is marching on. 

All this accords with the philosophy of our 
time. We do not minimize the influence of ideas, 
slowly trickling down from the few into the 
minds of the many until they become a part of 
life and sometimes decide the fate of nations and 
of ages. Nor do we forget those strange, almost 
inexplicable mass movements of human minds, 
which presage new epochs. Still the truth re- 
mains, and without it no history can be rightly 
written, that the sharp turning points in human 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 1 9 

progress have been due to great events and the 
rise of great personalities. 

The political evolution naturally led up to 
Napoleon, but when he unexpectedly appeared, 
he changed the whole course of the time, remade 
the map of Europe, and brought in a new era. 
With the French Revolution and Napoleon, his- 
tory turned a sharp corner. The world could 
never move along in the old groove again after 
the execution of Louis XVI. and the battle of 
Austerlitz. 

The Spanish-American war was not much of a 
war, but it has had the profoundest influence on 
our national life. Nothing could have been more 
unforeseen than the battle of Manila, yet it 
woke this country on that first of May to a new 
vision, a new duty and a new career. If an in- 
telligent American had gone to sleep in 1897 and 
awaked in 1899, ne could not have believed that 
one brief year could have produced so great a 
change. This little war was a momentous event. 
It made the United States a world power, and 
has brought about a new national feeling which 
has been and will be of tremendous import. 

In the middle of the last century Germany 



20 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

was a chaos of mutually jealous states, but Bis- 
marck rose, unified them into the strongest mili- 
tary empire of our time, and gave the German 
people the stimulus, which makes them today 
everywhere feared as business rivals. His iron 
will, his masterly diplomacy, his courage to fight 
at the right time, his ability to inspire a whole 
race, in short, this one man permanently altered 
the course of European history, and no one doubts 
that his mighty personality, however many helpers 
he may have had, was primarily alone'responsible. 

What was it that changed the history of the 
world in the first century? 

It would perhaps be fair to our fathers to say 
that most of them answered, Christianity, and 
by this they usually meant a certain system of 
truths, which they regarded as then for the 
first time revealed and proclaimed. A great deal 
of stress was laid on the originality of the revela- 
tion as proof of its divine character. But the 
scholars went to work on this proposition, and 
they have shown that many New Testament ideas 
were derived from the Old Testament, that there 
are the most striking parallels to many more in 
the uncanonical prechristian Jewish literature, 



THE POWER BEHIND THE HISTORY 21 

that Greek, Persian, Indian and Chinese sages 
had had some of the same thoughts, that some- 
what contemporary mysteries had rites and ideas 
surprisingly like the Christian. Thus critical in- 
vestigation seemed to have disproved the unique- 
ness of Christianity, and some Christians, much 
disturbed, began to doubt whether anything very 
remarkable had happened in the first century 
after all. 

But when the new scientific historical school 
came in, they perceived that in spite of all that 
had been shown, something of an epoch-making 
character had occurred in the first century. They 
traced Christianity back and they found that it 
had its source in a great personality. Chris- 
tianity is the most powerful moral and religious 
force in the world today, and has been, so far 
as Europe is concerned, for nineteen centuries. 
Such a movement must have an adequate cause, 
and no other adequate cause has ever been dis- 
covered except the personality of Jesus. There- 
fore he must be great enough to produce this 
age-long and world-wide effect. There are limits 
beyond which radical criticism cannot go and 
remain scientific. So Professor Schmiedel, one 



22 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

of the foremost radical critics, said to me in 
Zurich, "We may nibble away at the character 
of Jesus, but we must at least leave a suf- 
ficient initial impulse for this great and living 
thing called Christianity." 

The personality of the Man of Nazareth, then, 
is the power behind the Christian history. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SITUATION IN WHICH JESUS FOUND HIMSELF 

Two great factors formed the background of 
life in the first century, Greek civilization and 
Roman rule. Alexander had carried the Greek 
language and Greek culture to the Orient and 
his great empire had virtually become a Greek 
world. Even the remoter districts were more or 
less strongly influenced. Over this Greek world, 
Rome had extended its political sway. Men of 
our time are not likely to overestimate the power 
and efficiency of the Roman government at this 
period. It knit the various countries around the 
Mediterranean into one great compact body poli- 
tic, whose vigorous heart beat in Italy and sent 
the impulses of its authority to the furthest 
boundaries. 

When Jesus began his ministry, Palestine had 

been virtually Roman for nearly a hundred 

years, and composed part of the eastern frontier 

of the Empire. Judea and Samaria for more 

23 



24 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

than twenty years had constituted a Roman 
province of the second or third class under a 
Roman governor, called a procurator. Galilee and 
Perea for more than thirty years had been ruled 
by Herod Antipas, the tetrarch, a son of Herod 
the Great, but he was a mere underling of the 
Romans. The northeastern part of Palestine had 
been for the same period under similar conditions 
the dominion of Philip, the tetrarch, a half- 
brother of Antipas. 

The government of these rulers, while despotic 
and often arbitrary, was on the whole firm and 
just, and left much power in the hands of Jewish 
magistrates and courts. For more than twenty 
years, there had been practically uninterrupted 
peace, and Palestine consequently was populous, 
busy and rich. Jesus taught during a time of 
business prosperity. This was especially true of 
Galilee. 

The Jews of Jesus' time were much like the 
orthodox Jews of today, except that they were 
neither poor nor persecuted. Their two greatest 
interests were religion and money-making. Je- 
rusalem was the religious and political center; 
the seat of the temple, the Sanhedrin and the 



JESUS SITUATION 25 

priesthood. It was ecclesiastical, formal, con- 
servative, proud and intolerant. Galilee was 
freer in its religious and social life, capable of 
initiative and self-sacrifice, bold, courageous, un- 
sophisticated, unspoiled. The people to whom 
Jesus appealed were uncompromising monotheists, 
had no doubts of God, and were equally sure of the 
divine origin of the Old Testament. These things 
were taken for granted in all his teaching. His 
situation and task were radically different in these 
respects from ours. 

Though a frontier province, Palestine had 
many Greek cities, and was truly in the life of 
the Empire. Yet the Jews as a whole, though 
inevitably influenced by Gentile life and thought, 
most of them indeed speaking Greek, resolutely 
set themselves against everything Gentile, as do 
the orthodox Jews of today, and so far as pos- 
sible lived in a world of their own. 

This little Jewish world was divided by parties. 
Of these, the Sadducees were the rich, aristocratic, 
rationalistic, worldly party, made up principally 
of priests and their retainers, with the High 
Priest at their head. Their sympathies were 
with the Romans. They were a small, compact, 



26 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

powerful coterie, in political control at Jerusalem 
and in the Sanhedrin, but not largely influential 
with the people, or numerous outside the capital. 
They opposed the Pharisees doctrinally on tra- 
ditionalism, the life after death and predestina- 
tion. Apart from his last week in Jerusalem, 
this party is comparatively unimportant for the 
life and thought of Jesus. Its interest was in 
political power and wealth. 

The Pharisees formed a fraternity of some- 
thing over six thousand members, and were the 
nucleus of an influence which dominated the reli- 
gious life of the whole nation. They were the 
true leaders of the people, and, on that very 
account, though a minority in the Sanhedrin, 
practically dictated the action of that body. A 
Pharisee was one who set himself to obey all the 
prescriptions of the law, plus the endless interpre- 
tations of the scribes, which they held to be of 
equal validity. These interpretations referred par- 
ticularly to the law of clean and unclean (es- 
pecially to the items concerning food, and contact 
with unclean persons), to the Sabbath, and to 
tithes, fasting and prayers. Obedience was the 
soul of piety. The law and its external perform- 



JESUS' SITUATION 27 

ance filled the whole mental and spiritual horizon, 
and discouraged every attempt to realize com- 
munion with God or to nourish sympathy with 
men. Ethics was practically sacrificed to exter- 
nalized religion. Pride covered the Pharisees as a 
garment, but they were not esoteric. They made 
every effort to teach the law to all Israelites, in 
school, in synagogue and by the wayside. They 
compassed sea and land to make one proselyte. 
They earnestly longed for the golden day when 
Israel would keep the law and the traditions. The 
whole interest of the Pharisee was in law-keeping. 
His only care in politics was to secure a situation 
favorable to legalism. The Pharisees were a re- 
ligious and not a political party. 

The Zealots would not have called themselves 
a distinct party, being, like the rest of the people, 
admirers of the Pharisees. They were principally 
Galileans, and believed that it was a shame for 
Israel, the elect nation, destined to rule the world, 
to pay taxes or bow down to a heathen power. 
They were ready to revolt against Rome at any 
time, waiting only for a leader. They did not 
expect to be able to overcome the world empire 
alone, but thought that if they began the in- 



28 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

surrection, God would send the Messiah with 
his supernatural powers to their aid. The Sad- 
ducees and the more conservative Judean Phari- 
sees frowned on these ideas, but the common 
people and the less important Pharisees secretly 
favored them, until Zealotism plunged the nation 
into the war of 66-70. When the fighting began, 
Galilee offered the most stubborn resistance to 
Vespasian, and Galileans were the last desperate 
defenders of Jerusalem and Masada. It is easily 
seen how hazardous this Zealot feeling rendered 
Jesus' Messianic work in Galilee, and conse- 
quently Zealotism, which was a robust nationalism, 
is one of the main factors in the situation. 

The Messianic hope was active in Palestine 
in the time of Jesus. It was derived almost 
wholly from the Old Testament, but there were 
many different opinions as to what sort of person 
the Messiah would be and just what he would 
do. Possibly the best general statement is that 
the Jews expected the Messiah to be God's 
special Representative on earth, the Bringer of 
Salvation, the Founder of the Kingdom of God, 
and the final Judge of Men. Each party would 
desire, however, to interpret these phrases and 



JESUS SITUATION 29 

modify them in its own way. Yet the people 
generally expected the Messiah to be a human, 
Davidic King, to destroy Israel's enemies, es- 
pecially Rome, to judge the world, to establish 
a universal Jewish empire with Jerusalem as its 
capital, and thereafter to reign in righteousness 
and peace. The Sadducees desired no Messiah. 
The Pharisees waited for God to take the initia- 
tive, on condition that Israel kept the law. The 
Zealots would take the initiative themselves, ex- 
pecting God to reward their faith by sending the 
Messiah to help them. Jesus satisfied none of 
these expectations. 

There existed in Judaism an apocalyptic litera- 
ture, which professed to unveil to the oppressed 
people of God the future and the unseen world. 
The books which especially interest us are the 
Books of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the 
Apocalypse of Baruch, and Fourth Ezra. These 
are at once the most apocalyptic and the richest 
in allusions to the Messiah. They are all founded 
on the Book of Daniel and similar passages in 
the Old Testament prophets. They give us the 
apocalyptic view of the Messiah, as a pre-existent, 
supernatural, semi-divine being, sent by God 



30 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

from heaven to be the Savior of Israel from its 
enemies and the final Judge of Men. This is 
quite different from what might be called the 
popular political view, the idea of a Davidic king 
and conqueror, born as a man among men. The 
greatest historical question about Jesus is his 
relation to these two radically different concep- 
tions. 

Although they have some phrases in common, 
it is improbable that Jesus or the earlier apostles 
had read these books. Many of the apocalyptic 
ideas were undoubtedly more or less common 
among the people, and from their speech they 
get into both the Gospels and the apocalyptic 
literature. The books themselves probably sprang 
from small sects rather than from the main stock 
of Pharisaic Judaism. 

The common people from whom Jesus and the 
apostles came, and with whom they had most to 
do, were not Sadducees. Neither were they 
Pharisees. They greatly admired the Pharisees 
and took them for the highest types of piety. 
The majority did the best they could and plodded 
after the Pharisaic leaders, but a great many 
were too busy or too poor to devote their lives 



JESUS' SITUATION 3 1 

to keeping endless regulations. On account of 
their failure to make even a serious attempt at 
the legalistic ideal, these people were discouraged, 
and many became "sinners," i. e., men who 
made no pretense of keeping the law. To these 
men Jesus offered his easier yoke and his blessed 
rest. He was the friend of the "sinners." 

Among the Jews of Jesus' day were many 
truly pious people of generally Pharisaic type, but 
hardly with the Pharisaic emphasis on legalism. 
They were simple in their thought, nourished 
their life on the Old Testament scriptures and 
lived in communion with God. They have been 
called "The Devout." They were really Old 
Testament Jews, somewhat influenced by con- 
temporary thought, and they looked hopefully 
and prayerfully for the consolation of Israel. 
They formed the special seed-plot of Christianity. 
It was in such devout homes that the Baptist, 
Jesus, and most of the Twelve grew up. 

So we have the Sadducees representing worldli- 
ness; the Pharisees, legalism; the Zealots, na- 
tionalism and revolution; the Messianic hope and 
the apocalyptic dreams; and the common people, 
distressed and discouraged, and yet in expecta- 



32 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

tion of some help from God. Pharisaic legalism, 
Zealot revolutionary nationalism, and the Mes- 
sianic hope constituted the problem for Jesus, 
and our principal interest is in seeing how he 
handled these elements of the situation. 
/"And now John the Baptist comes, a voice cry- 
ing in the wilderness, a fresh breath of the ozone 
[ of heaven's hills in a stagnant world, a prophet 
in word and deed. He proclaims the Messianic 
kingdom at hand, declares that the Messiah will 
soon appear for judgment, and bids all men 
repent. The people were profoundly moved, 
"the Messianic hope revived with a start, and 
the whole structure of Pharisaic legalism began 
to crack and crumble." For John, with amazing 
insight and boldness, demanded more than ex- 
ternal piety, more than a stricter legalism. He 
insisted on a real change of mind and heart 
towards God, towards sin, towards fellow men, 
i. e., towards life itself. It would not do to appeal 
to racial privilege and say, "We have Abraham 
for our Father." God could make children of 
Abraham out of these stones. Nothing but genu- 
ine repentance would suffice. It seemed as if 
Amos or Isaiah had risen from the dead. The 



JESUS' SITUATION 33 

people came in thousands to hear and to receive 
the baptism of repentance, by which they sym- 
bolized their burial of the old life and their resur- 
rection to the new. But the Sadducees in their 
cynicism and the Pharisees in their self-righteous 
pride stood aloof from the man, who regarded 
them as a generation of vipers, fit only for the 
wrath to come. Just as little did John please 
the Zealots, who waited in vain for a call to arms 
amid the exhortations to repentance. It was a 
great revival of genuine morality and pure reli- 
gion. Jesus could not stand indifferent. He came 
and was baptized. 

(Note. — At this point many will wish to turn to the Appendix, 
which furnishes a brief and comprehensive survey of the principal 
divisions and events in the Life of Jesus.) 



CHAPTER III 

HOW DID JESUS COME TO BELIEVE HIMSELF THE 
MESSIAH? 

Although a matter of some doubt, the better 
opinion seems to be that the Messianic hope 
was strong among the Jews during the boyhood 
of Jesus. At least we know that with the preach- 
ing of John the Baptist it became the center 
of national interest. But before that event, when 
Jesus was ten or twelve years old, and a re- 
markably bright boy for his age, Judas of Galilee 
had risen in rebellion against Rome at the time 
of the taxing under Quirinius, and, according to 
Josephus, had thereby inaugurated the patriotic 
movement. His followers developed into the well 
known Zealot party of resolute nationalists, who 
thought that if they only took the initiative 
against the Romans, God would send the Messiah 
to their aid. This rebellion threw all Galilee 
into a ferment and the issues must have been 
pondered in every home. The Old Testament 
34 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 35 

pictures of the Golden Age, the theocratic king 
and the Servant of Jehovah were seen in livelier 
colors, and the family at Nazareth could not 
have been unmoved. In fact, the whole country 
fell to discussing the matter. Among the Phari- 
sees especially, various ideas emerged, for we 
must remember that, while in those days conduct 
was exactly prescribed, faith was free and theol- 
ogy, outside a few leading ideas, was very much 
in the fog. While then in Jesus' boyhood the 
Messianic hope was vague and confused, various 
parties vacillating between different ideas of just 
what the Messiah would do, and just what sort 
of person he would be, it is still probably correct 
to say, as we have said before, that the common 
denominator of all these opinions may be ex- 
pressed thus: The Messiah would be God's special 
Representative on earth, the Bringer of Salvation, 
the Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven and the 
final Judge of Men. Each party, of course, 
would wish to add, define, explain and modify, 
but this formula could express every view. And 
this Messiah Jesus thought himself to be. Of 
course, he too had his ideas of the meaning of 
these terms, especially, salvation and the kingdom 



36 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

of God, but that is another story, which will 
be told in subsequent chapters. 

In spite of all that can be said against it, the 
fact stands fast that Jesus thought himself the 
Messiah, and that in the sense above expressed. 
The gospel passages which go to make up the 
proof are numerous, but we will mention only a 
few of the more important, and will try at the 
same time to find out how early in life the idea 
entered Jesus' mind. 

We know that he believed himself to be the 
Messiah at the final Jewish trial, when the High 
Priest asked him the direct question, "Art thou 
the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?" Think 
for a moment of the solemnity of that scene. 
Jesus stood at last before the supreme court of 
Israel; the High Priest, the political and religious 
head of the nation, who might well be looked 
upon as the mouthpiece of the whole people, 
asked the question. In asking it, he put Jesus 
under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and 
nothing but the truth. On the answer, Jesus 
knew full well, depended his life or death. But 
he did not equivocate, he did not explain, he 
did not hesitate. He answered simply and firmly, 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 37 

"I am," and "what is more," he added, "one 
day you, who judge me now, will appear before 
my Messianic judgment seat." Any possible 
remaining doubt that Jesus thought himself the 
Messiah in his last week of life is swept away, 
when we remember the Messianic Triumphal 
Entry four days before this confession, and the 
fact that a few hours after it the Sanhedrists 
charged Jesus before Pilate with claiming to be 
the Messianic King, which, of course, with the 
Roman Governor was nothing less than high 
treason. Pilate in accord with this charge placed 
above Jesus' head upon the cross the words, 
"This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King (the Mes- 
sianic King) of the Jews." The proof is complete. 
We now go back into the ministry, possibly 
nearly a year, to Cassarea Philippi. Jesus has 
been journeying with his disciples through non- 
Jewish lands, and near this practically heathen 
capital, he asks them the momentous question, 
"Whom say ye that I am?" When Peter, in spite 
of all the evidence to the contrary replies, "Thou 
art the Messiah," Jesus accepts the answer with 
joy. "Blessed art thou Simon Bar- Jonah," he 
says, "for flesh and blood has not revealed it to 



38 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

thee, but my Father, who is in heaven." These 
words ring as certainly as the confession before 
the Sanhedrin. 

But we can trace this thought in Jesus' mind 
to the time of the temptation, in the very be- 
ginning of his ministry. It is a fundamental 
error to see in Satan's "If thou art the Son of 
God" any suggestion of doubt, as though the 
temptation to Jesus were to doubt his Messiah- 
ship. Rather, to avoid ambiguity, we might well 
translate, "Since thou art the Son of God," do so 
and so. 1 Jesus' Messiahship is taken for granted, 
it is made the very basis of temptation. The mat- 
ter decided in that hour was not whether Jesus 
was the Messiah or not, but what sort of Messiah 
this Galilean peasant would choose to be, what 
should be the fundamental principles of his Mes- 
sianic activity. 

Can we go yet further up the stream of Jesus' 
life and still find this thought? Doubtless. The 
principal thing in the vision at the baptism is the 
divine message, "Thou art my beloved Son, in 

1 Just as it might be said to an American President with refer- 
ence to some bill, "If you are the President of the United States, 
send in your veto," and this would mean, "Since you are the 
President of the United States — and you are — send in your veto." 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 39 

whom I am well pleased." The first words 
would bring to any Jewish mind the second 
Psalm, "Yet I have set my king upon my holy 
hill of Zion. I will tell the decree: Jehovah said 
unto me, Thou art my son; this day have I be- 
gotten thee." This is the theocratic king; and 
the Servant of Jehovah of Isaiah 42: 1 would 
probably be suggested by the second phrase, "in 
whom I am well pleased." To Jesus, this word 
then could mean nothing less and nothing else 
than, "Thou art the Messiah," the Messianic 
king, "my Servant sent to bring Jacob again to 
me, and to be my salvation unto the ends of the 
earth." (Isaiah 49: 5, 6) 

But did he think himself the Messiah before 
his baptism? We enter here upon more debatable 
ground, but we must, I think, say, "yes." Two 
considerations lead us to this conclusion. In 
Matthew's account, John the Baptist is repre- 
sented as saying to Jesus as he presents himself 
to be baptized, "I have need to be baptized of 
thee and comest thou to me?" John senses in 
Jesus his moral and spiritual superior, just as we 
are often aware of standing in the presence of 
men stronger, abler, purer than we are. With 



40 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Jesus before him, John's own moral need pain- 
fully obtrudes itself on his conscience. He feels 
that he would like, himself, to be baptized by 
this one mightier and better than he. But what 
does Jesus say? Does he tell John that he has 
made a mistake, that he does not stand in the 
presence of a superior after all? Nothing of the 
kind. He rather says, "John, you are correct. 
It would be more fitting for me to baptize you, 
but, in the circumstances, there are reasons which 
make the other course right." These words 
prove that Jesus, even before the baptism, felt 
himself the superior of John, whom he afterwards 
called "more than a prophet" and, indeed, "the 
greatest born of women." Could such a superior 
be any other than the Messiah? A second con- 
sideration makes this answer certain. It is un- 
psychological to suppose that the vision at the 
baptism gave Jesus an entirely new idea. Things 
do not happen that way in life. God prepares 
men for his revelations, and must necessarily 
have done so in this case, where the revelation 
was the most astounding ever made to any of the 
sons of men. Had it come as unexpectedly as a 
bolt from the blue, it would probably first have 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 41 

stunned and dazed Jesus, and then have unbal- 
anced his mind. When we come to think it over 
carefully, we must believe that Jesus had long 
had the idea and that the voice from heaven 
gave him only his final certainly. And this is 
confirmed by those words reported as from his 
lips at twelve years of age, "I must be about my 
Father's business," l words which certainly do not 
imply Messiahship, but do suggest that even at 
that age Jesus felt that he was divinely called 
to devote his life to some distinctly religious 
task. 

Some indeed would go further than this and 
say that he knew himself as Messiah even from 
the cradle. But in this they go not merely be- 
yond scripture, but beyond all that we can 
understand. My Sunday School teacher, for 
instance, used to teach us that, as man, Jesus 
knew no more than an ordinary infant, but that, 
as God, he knew all things. This, however, was 
not Luke's view. He writes, "The child grew 
and waxed strong, becoming filled (margin) with 
wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him " 
(Luke 2: 40); and again, "And Jesus advanced 
1 1 prefer this translation of the Authorized Version. 



42 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God 
and men" (Luke 2: 52); and the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews thought that "though 
he was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the 
things which he suffered" (5: 8). Moreover such 
a double person, who thought and acted now as 
God and now as man, is very far removed from 
us, could not have been truly a man, nor have 
lived a truly human life. We cannot think of him 
as a real brother, involved in our difficulties, 
fighting the same sort of battle which we must 
fight, or really conquering in the moral conflict. 
This Jesus, now God and now man, is thus alien 
to us and we instinctively feel that he cannot 
truly sympathize with us in our temptations, 
struggles and sorrows. 

My Sunday School teacher was only repeating 
a dictum of fourth century theologians, which 
cannot be made binding on free Protestant Chris- 
tians, and which is entirely out of tune with 
modern feeling and conceptions. As a sincere 
attempt to explain the mystery of the personality 
of Jesus and guarantee his unique greatness and 
divinity, it is worthy of our respect, but we can- 
not help feeling that it is mechanical, unnatural, 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 43 

impossible and without warrant either in Scrip- 
ture or in experience. Our age demands a more 
vital theory, more in line with what we know of 
mental and moral growth, more congruous with 
the portrait of Jesus in the gospels. While per- 
haps we cannot define our idea with the sharpness 
vouchsafed those ancient theologians, we may 
say that we must think of Jesus as developing 
like any other child. Like all great personalities, 
he gradually became conscious of himself, of his 
capacities, of the work God had given him to 
do, and of the career and the destiny before him. 
But more than any other, he was led of the 
Spirit in it all. 

But can we discover the source and trace the 
development of Jesus' idea that he was the Mes- 
siah during the years which preceded his baptism? 
I think we can. To be sure, the only passage 
to which we can appeal is the one already quoted, 
Luke 2: 49, "I must be about my Father's busi- 
ness." But this is too meagre a foundation on 
which to build, too uncertain in various ways to 
bear the superstructure we intend to erect. We 
are thrown back on wider considerations. 

We choose to base the whole of our present 



44 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

investigation and indeed the whole of this book 
on the moral perfection of Jesus. We do not 
prove this by reviewing all the words and deeds 
of Jesus recorded in the gospels, and coming to 
the conclusion that Jesus knew no sin. Such a 
method is illusory. These reports may not be 
unbiased and are certainly fragmentary, and the 
conclusion is therefore not indisputable. There 
is a broader and, it seems to me, an incontestable 
proof. It is this. The higher a man's moral and 
spiritual standard, the surer he is to see and con- 
fess his sinfulness and shortcomings. The great- 
est saints, like Paul, Jonathan Edwards and 
John Wesley, have ever felt their sin most acutely. 
Now all will acknowledge that Jesus was a man 
of exquisite moral feeling and deepest spiritual 
insight. He was and is the great searcher of 
human hearts. Yet he never seems to have been 
conscious of any sin or fault or shortcoming in 
himself. He never prayed for forgiveness, nor 
expressed the slightest regret for anything he ever 
did. Again, Jesus was the greatest teacher in 
the sphere of morals and religion. No one ever 
set the ethical standard so high, or preached more 
solemnly the seriousness of the moral struggle. 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAH SHIP 45 

Yet he never by a single word expressed the 
slightest aspiration to be better than he was. 

If it is objected that this proof also is insuffi- 
cient, that, in this case too, omissions and im 
perfections in the records may render it all illu- 
sory, we answer with perfect confidence. This 
method of representing the goodness of Jesus as 
a goodness, unlike that of all other good men, 
without repentance and without aspiration, de- 
mands an originality and insight deeper than we 
can ascribe to the simple Christians who wrote 
these memorials. Moreover, according to this 
theory, they have succeeded in building upon 
this unique principle a character moving in a 
real world of men with its vicissitudes, perplexi- 
ties and tragedies, uttering thousands of words 
on most diverse topics and in varied situations, 
and yet they have made him so natural, so real, 
so simple, so good and nevertheless so great, that 
he has influenced the world as none other. This 
feat, says Rousseau, no friend of Christianity, 
would be a greater miracle than the character 
itself. So also says John Stuart Mill. We agree 
with them. Jesus was the perfect man. No 
one has ever yet been able to conceive a char- 



46 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

acter greater, wiser, or better than he, nor has 
anyone like him yet appeared in history. The 
greatest test of Jesus' character was this very 
idea of Messiahship; as Oscar Holtzmann says, 
"the greatest thought that ever entered a human 
mind and left it sane." But in spite of this 
marvelous assumption, he never strikes the reader 
of the gospels as an egotist, but is perfectly bal- 
anced, calm and straightforward, nay more, al- 
ways giving the impression of gentleness, humil- 
ity, love and unselfishness. "This impression of 
perfection which the Master made is entirely 
unique in the spiritual history of man. No one 
ever made it before, and no one ever tried to 
claim it." 

Founding everything then upon the moral 
perfection of Jesus, we again ask, Can we dis- 
cover the source and trace the development of 
his idea that he was the Messiah, during the 
years that preceded his baptism? We find that 
this question practically resolves itself into an- 
other, How would a morally perfect boy, the 
boy who became the man Jesus, develop? In 
other words, we must trace the character of Jesus 
to its source, and in so doing may legitimately 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 47 

use all we know of Jesus, of his career, and of 
his thought, for the man is only the larger and 
maturer boy. The following paragraphs present 
therefore no merely imaginative picture based on 
a fanciful theory, but a sketch which is true to 
the best data we have. 

First of all, brought up in a Jewish home, the 
thought of God was perfectly natural to Jesus. He 
drew it in with his mother's milk. He grew up 
with it. It was the very center of his thought. 
He was absolutely sure of God. Never a doubt 
about him ever flitted across his mind. 

All the world seemed full of God to him. 
Heaven was God's throne, the earth was his foot- 
stool. God sent the sunshine and the rain, God 
fed the birds and would feed his children too, 
God made the grass grow and painted the lily. 
How much more would he clothe those who 
trusted him ever so imperfectly? God led men by 
his own hand. If perchance, to strengthen and 
broaden them, he brought them into temptation, 
he delivered them from the evil. Jesus was sure 
that God was always near and that he could 
depend upon him. His trust was as simple and 
as strong as that of a child in its mother. 



48 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

God never seemed vague, unreal or strange 
to him. No slightest shade of alienation ever 
clouded God's face. No feeling of guilt ever 
made him afraid of God or gave him any desire 
to hide from him. He called God his Father, 
not because he mysteriously knew of some unique 
connection with him before the world was, but 
because he felt so much at home with God. I 
know that I am the son of a noble father, whom 
God yet graciously spares to me, not so much 
because of the facts recorded in the family Bible, 
as because I find myself so much one with him. 
I understand his peculiar physical movements. 
I know why he does just this or that, and ex- 
actly how he feels when he does these things. I 
divine his thought before he speaks. I antici- 
pate his wishes. There is a deep understanding 
and interplay of feeling and life between us. His 
characteristic mental action is perfectly familiar 
to me. If someone asks him a question, I often 
can predict his reply before he utters it. Jesus 
knew his Father, God, even more intimately, 
found himself in wonderful harmony and unison 
with him. God's thought seemed to him the 
most natural thing in the world. He found 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 49 

that he felt as God felt towards righteousness and 
evil, toward men and life. He discovered that 
his own deepest purpose was a reproduction of 
his Father's. So he felt that God was his Father. 
It was deeper than reason, alien to the realm of 
logic. It was instinct. His moral and spiritual 
likeness to God made him sure that he was 
God's own child. 

So he lived in daily communion with his 
Father, and this communion was the sunshine of 
his soul, the very life of his inmost spirit. It 
was an unbroken and delightful union of love, 
an unspeakable joy welling up from the very 
depths of his nature. 

He read the Old Testament like every other 
Jewish child, but he dwelt most of all on Deu- 
teronomy, the Psalms and the prophets. These 
were his favorite books. In loving study of these 
scriptures, he often meditated on Isaiah's glow- 
ing prophecies of the glory, purity and blessing 
of Messianic times, but he felt that nothing there 
described went beyond what he experienced every 
day. God's presence, the light of his counte- 
nance, the satisfaction of soul, the deep peace, 
the holy joy, the sense of perfect security, the 



50 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

beauty of righteousness, so sublimely described, 
all were his. He could imagine no future in 
which he or other men could enjoy more than he 
already possessed. There was only one conclu- 
sion, these prophecies had been fulfilled in him, 
heaven was in his heart, the kingdom of God 
was within him. In Nazareth, he daily sat down 
to all of the good things of the Messianic feast 
and rejoiced as he looked into his Father's face. 
Others might think the Messianic time to be 
still future, but in his own soul, he knew that 
it was now. 

All this had a charming naturalness about it. 
As Jesus developed, his secret conviction grew 
in strength and definiteness. His was a happy, 
healthy boyhood. It is a great mistake to sup- 
pose that sin is an essential part of human nature. 
It is not only not necessary to it, but is an ugly 
twist given to what would otherwise be good and 
beautiful. It is a greater mistake to look upon 
religion in a child as something unnatural and 
morbid. This sinless boy who grew up with 
the thought of God as his Father, whose moral 
perfection deepened and widened with his ex- 
perience of life, was the only perfectly normal 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 5 1 

boy of whom history tells us, and if we but knew 
more of the years of his childhood and youth, 
would be the ideal for boys of all lands and all 
ages. 

With this treasure in his heart, Jesus looked 
out of happy eyes, upon the world of men about 
him. He observed the motives and conduct of 
his brothers and sisters, of the men and women 
of Nazareth, and perhaps from the hill beyond 
the city gazed on the Roman legions as they 
marched, and the traffic which streamed to and 
fro along the road between Ptolemais on the 
one hand and Capernaum and Damascus on the 
other. All lived the ordinary life of men before 
him. They had no idea that this quiet, good 
boy was to make the name of his obscure town 
known on all the continents and through all the 
centuries. So they ate, they drank, they bought, 
they sold, they planted, they builded, they mar- 
ried and were given in marriage. But Jesus' 
sensitive soul soon discovered, possibly at first 
with some surprise, that these people had no 
such blessed experience of the Father's presence 
and love as he possessed. 

God seemed far off from them and they from 



52 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

God, they did not live in his presence, nor feel 
him in their hearts. It was theirs to keep his 
law, to be sure, but he himself, most of them 
conceived, lived far away in heaven, only re- 
motely interested in their daily cares. Some, 
who had been caught in the snare of Gentile 
thought, even doubted whether there were a God. 

They looked out upon the world, but they did 
not see God in it all. The sun rose in the splen- 
dor of crimson and gold over the eastern hills, 
flooding the world with light, and set in the 
western sea, painting the sky with glory, but 
most of them never noticed it, and few saw the 
God of beauty and of love in it. They painfully 
or carelessly toiled along the common road from 
the cradle to the grave, but few saw the Father's 
hand leading them through the sunshine and the 
shadow. 

Many were estranged from God by a sense of 
sin and guilt. He grew very dim and misty to 
their thought and they felt a wall of separation 
between him and them. When conscience awoke, 
they feared him as a criminal fears the judge. 
Some of them indeed did not like to think of 
him, for the thought brought them no joy or 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 53 

peace. Possibly Jesus may have spoken to many 
of them of the blessedness of his experience, but 
found their ears deaf and their heart gross. 

Jesus saw that all their life and happiness 
was spoiled by sin and selfishness and inner 
falsity, by envy, jealousy, covetousness, lust, 
contempt, pride and hatred, by anxiety, distrust 
and fear, by aimlessness, loneliness, weariness 
and despair, by the burden of guilt and the 
consciousness of moral failure; and with poverty, 
disaster, disease and death ever standing just 
behind the door, their lot was sad indeed. 

Then his Savior-heart was stirred. He was 
filled with compassion for them, for they were 
scattered and distressed as sheep that had no 
shepherd. His limitless love went out to them. 
He knew that all their sin and misery would 
vanish, if they could only live like him in the 
sunshine of the Father's face, and he longed to 
bring them into the blessing which irradiated his 
life with purity and peace and joy. 1 

1 He felt that he had what they had not. "He never put him- 
self on the same level of sonship with men. He felt himself above 
men here. They needed repentance, he none. He could not have 
called himself Messiah, if he had not felt the difference first." 

Von Soden. 



54 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

And this was his call, a call from above. Here 
was his work, a work which lay immediately at 
his hand. It was perfectly simple, perfectly 
plain. All he had to do was to bring men into 
the same communion with God which he pos- 
sessed. His whole business was to give, to give 
his inner self to those about him. And he felt 
in himself the strength to do it. He understood 
now that he had been born for no other purpose, 
that God had given him all needed resources to 
accomplish this blessed mission. He trusted in 
God to lead him, to show him the way, to give 
him the opportunities. The voice at the baptism 
only brought him to a final certainty. With 
every step the conviction deepened that his 
Father had sent him to do this very thing. And 
when the road grew rough and steep, and the 
shadow of a cross loomed in the distance, his 
love never drew back, but he went right on 
through suspicion, calumny, danger, treachery, 
insult, pain and death itself to do his work of 
love. 

Most appropriately Luke represents him as 
preaching his first sermon from the text, long 
since spoken of the Servant of Jehovah, 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 55 

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 
Because he anointed me to preach good tidings 
to the poor: 

He hath sent me to proclaim release to the 
captives, 
And recovering of sight to the blind, 
To set at liberty them that are bruised, 
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 
And the middle of the ministry repeats the mes- 
sage: 

"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my 
yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek 
and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your 
souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is 
light." He bids men come to him and learn 
what his heart can teach them. That heart's ex- 
perience is salvation and rest. 

Having this work to do, having received this 
divine call, having, been endued with all the 
power of the Spirit, he most naturally thought of 
himself as Messiah. There was no other word 
in his world to express him. So we see that his 
Messiahship was no arbitrary title, ambitiously 
grasped at in self-will by one who could scarcely 



56 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

stagger under its load. We see too how unsatis- 
factory and superficial is the view that it was 
something unexpectedly imposed upon him from 
without at his baptism. Rather his inner ex- 
perience of communion with God, his sonship, 
was the source of his Messiahship. What he was 
was the root of what he became. He came to 
think that he was the Messiah, because he found 
that he had a Messiah's work to do, and that he 
had within himself the resources to do it. The 
strong man leaped up with joy to perform the 
mighty task, confident in his own powers, and 
relying implicitly on God. 

All was natural. It was the unfolding of the 
greatest of personalities. He went forth to share 
with men his joy, his freedom, his light, his 
energy; to give men his life — a life with God, a 
life of love and righteousness. This is the inmost 
secret of his mission. To this delightful spiritual 
experience of his boyhood and youth we trace 
everything back as to its spring. Nay more, 
the source of the church, of Christianity and of 
Christian civilization is found at last to be the 
heart of Jesus. 

And as a matter of fact, history has proved 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 57 

that he was the Messiah in the sense in which 
he used that term. He was and is God's special 
Representative upon earth. Men can name no 
greater. No one else has ever so impressed upon 
the world the sense of the presence of God. He 
seems the embodiment of the divine purity and 
the divine love. He brings in himself God's 
message of peace and hope to men. In him we 
see the Father, learn to know his will, and feel the 
beating of his heart. Jesus translates all our 
religious abstractions into concrete realities, all 
our theologies into life, all our vague spiritual 
dreams and hopes into action and endeavor. 

He was and is the Bringer of Salvation. All 
who have come to him, who have accepted the 
simple though radical conditions which he lays 
down, and who have surrendered their lives to 
his guidance have been saved. And by this I 
mean that, either gradually or suddenly, accord- 
ing to temperament and the circumstances of 
the case, they have experienced such a sense of 
freedom from old burdens and limitations, such 
a new feeling of purity and peace, such an access 
of moral and spiritual power, such a realization 
of love for all men and especially for God, such 



58 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

a new and worthy purpose in life, such a unity 
of heart and mind and will, such freshness, joy 
and hope as all together can be counted nothing 
less than a new life. And they come to recognize 
that this is, after all, only sharing the wonderful 
energy and purity of the inner life of Jesus. And 
just in proportion as nations and ages and society in 
general have entered into the blessings which Jesus 
offers in himself, have they felt the hew stir, the new 
impulse and the new hope, and entered upon 
higher moral and spiritual stages of development. 
He was and is the Founder of the Kingdom of 
God on earth. That kingdom is being set up 
today on every continent and among the people 
of every race and language on the whole globe. 
His name is praised from the rising of the sun 
to the going down thereof. All spheres of life 
and activity are being subdued to his will. The 
multitude which hails him the Lord of their 
lives continually increases, and with fervent faith 
believes the day will come when he shall reign as 
the spiritual leader and undisputed moral king of 
men. No one can reasonably doubt that the 
present movement descends through the centuries 
from the Jesus of Galilee and Jerusalem. 



JESUS AND THE MESSIAHSHIP 59 

He is and will be the Judge of Men. If he 
is, as we have tried to prove, the one morally 
and spiritually perfect man, the new type of a 
higher race, excelling all others in beauty and 
strength and the glory of a divine holiness and 
love, then surely every character must finally be 
tested by the attitude assumed toward him, and 
he becomes the touchstone of destiny. 

So then he is Messiah, not only because we 
can show from many Scripture passages that he 
so thought himself, but because he had the ex- 
perience of God and the spiritual power to do a 
Messiah's work, and lastly because, as a matter 
of fact, he was and is God's special Representa- 
tive on earth, the Bringer of Salvation, the 
Founder of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the 
Judge of Men. History has proved him to be 
Messiah, in the sense in which he used the word. 



CHAPTER IV 

HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 

Part I 

Two great elements in the life of Palestine 
determined the outer form of the career of Jesus, 
and their complications constituted that tangled 
web of circumstance through which he had to 
cut his way. The first was Pharisaic legalism, 
the less important of the two, whose considera- 
tion we consequently postpone to another chap- 
ter. The other and more important, to one who 
believed himself the Messiah, was the Messianic 
Hope of Israel. 

At the risk of repetition, we again sketch the 
situation. The common people, at least after 
John the Baptist began to preach, eagerly ex- 
pected a Messiah, who would be a son of David, 
born as a man of men, an earthly king, who 
would break the power of the Romans, deliver 
the Jews from their oppression, hold a judgment 
day, found a world empire with Jerusalem as 
60 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 6l 

the capital and the Jews as the ruling people, and 
thenceforth reign in peace and righteousness. 
This Messiah would be endowed with super- 
natural powers, and would have all the resources 
of God for his great and holy enterprise. The 
ethical element was of the essence of this hope, 
more or less strong in the minds of various 
groups. 

The Zealots were the men who took this ex- 
pectation of a political Messiah in earnest, and 
felt that if they only initiated the rebellion 
against Rome, God would send the Messiah to 
their aid. They were the party of action and 
aggression. It is important for us to remember 
that Galilee was the birthplace and the hotbed 
of Zealotism. It is the free-born, unspoiled 
Galileans, who rise in rebellion again and again, 
against whom Vespasian with sixty thousand 
men must wage a relentless campaign of a year's 
duration, before he can besiege the capital. It 
is these Galilean Zealots, who undertake the 
defense of Jerusalem, who die in the last ditch 
at Masada, and who grace Titus' triumph in Rome. 
The Jerusalem and Judea of Jesus' time, rich, 
ecclesiastical, formal, did not favor such violent 



62 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

and fanatical ideas. They felt on the whole 
that it was best to wait God's good time, which 
they thought would come only on condition of a 
perfect keeping of the law, and therefore was in- 
definitely distant. Then in some inexplicable 
way God would send his Messiah, a being more 
or less vaguely supernatural, who would carry 
out the same political program which the com- 
mon people expected. 

A few among the Pharisees carried the hope 
of a supernatural Messiah to its extreme. They 
looked for a preexistent Son of Man, who would 
come from heaven to judge the world and in- 
augurate a new age of supernatural glory. This 
was the apocalyptic view, as opposed to the political 
view held with variations by the common people, 
the Zealots and the more conservative Pharisees. 
With these two views, apocalyptic and political, 
Jesus had to reckon. 

This chapter will show how Jesus handled 
these ideas and sentiments, and will especially 
attempt to trace the movement of his own mind 
and to analyze the great crises of his Messianic 
career. It will therefore be a skeleton sketch of 
his ministry from his own point of view, dealing 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 63 

with the more important questions connected 
with his life. 

Jesus entered this world of conflicting Mes- 
sianic views with a different and perfectly definite 
Messianic conception of his own, utterly independ- 
ent of the popular ideas in its origin, for it had 
its source in his own experience of God and of 
spiritual blessedness. The clue that will lead us 
through the tangled maze before us is simply 
this, that Jesus held firmly to his own conception 
of his mission to the end. To be sure, he must 
relate it to the popular ideas, must express it in 
the popular language, and must perhaps modify 
it and add to it as vicissitudes arose. But he 
never changed it in any essential particular. 
Whatever he appropriated from the popular be- 
liefs only served to express his own view to the 
people, or helped him to hold it strongly in the 
swirling eddies of the conflict. And this is the 
touch of reality. The gospels show us the ideal- 
istic man of Nazareth with his matchless inner 
experience leaving his quiet life, and, the moment 
he steps upon the public stage, caught in the 
cross currents of interests, opinions and preju- 
dices, and soon in desperate struggle with narrow 



64 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

bigotry, sordid covetousness, patriotic ambitions 
and treacherous superficiality. Here is the ideal 
man in the real world. 

The origin and content of Jesus' own view of 
his mission and Messiahship were sketched in 
the last chapter. Suffice it to say here that, im- 
mediately after his baptism, Jesus was sure of 
two things; that he enjoyed a unique relationship 
and communion with God, and that he was called 
of God to bring this spiritual blessing to men, 
especially to the Jewish nation. This was salva- 
tion, and he was, therefore, Savior. To this 
end, he felt himself endued with all the necessary 
spiritual power. These are the fundamental 
facts about Jesus, at this time, and it is neces- 
sary for us to conceive them clearly in all their 
simplicity. Our whole aim must be to see Jesus 
with new eyes, to put aside for the time at least 
all preconceptions and prejudices, to forget the 
everlasting debate about New Testament descrip- 
tions of him and the later theological controversies 
about his person, and to observe this Galilean 
in his actual career as objectively as did the 
earliest disciples and yet with minds even more 
open than theirs. When the clouds of dust raised 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 65 

by centuries of conflict and criticism finally lift, 
we should see that the naked fact is that a new 
type of man, fresh, strong and unique, appeared in 
our race in the first century. With this simple 
and yet pregnant statement, we begin inde- 
pendently to make our own sketch of the history 
and significance of Jesus. 

We shall not understand the man or the his- 
tory, however, unless we recognize as funda- 
mental in him a crystalline purity of heart, an 
absolute honesty and straightforwardness, which 
precluded the slightest attempt to appear what 
he was not, and prevented him from swerving 
for a moment a hair's breadth from the straight 
line of right to court popularity, avoid pain, or 
fall in with the ideas of the crowd. In other 
words, he was morally sound to the core. His 
hope, his perfect childlike trust was not in man, 
but in God, his Father, on whom he relied for 
guidance and loving care. Yet no man ever 
walked more warily than he. In him boldness, 
faith and wisdom were perfectly combined. 

Immediately after his baptism, Jesus was cer- 
tain that he was the Messiah or Savior in the 
sense already stated. The very simplicity of it 



66 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

all was almost baffling, however. How was he 
to go to work? What were to be the first steps of 
this Nazarene carpenter, who wanted to save 
the world, and yet was so different from what a 
Messiah was expected to be? On what funda- 
mental principles was he to act? The story of 
the Temptation lets us into his inner thought on 
these questions. Here we see the kind of things 
he decided not to do and the positive laws of 
conduct which emerge from the decisions. The 
first temptation tells us that he would not use 
the peculiar power of which he was conscious to 
help himself out of any difficulty or danger, even 
to save his life. "He saved others, himself he 
could not save." Without any reserve, he threw 
himself into the service of men, by this principle 
burning all his bridges behind him. He trusted 
only in God's provision for his wants and God's 
aid in distress. Beyond that he would not and 
could not go. He resolved to fight the fight with 
advantages no greater than are vouchsafed the 
humblest and weakest of men. In the second 
contest he met and conquered the lure to fanat- 
icism, the tempting of God in self-will and spiri- 
tual pride. This is one of the commonest, sub- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 67 

tlest and most destructive enticements and it 
appeals most powerfully to men of faith. It 
was the ruin of all the Jewish Messianic pre- 
tenders of that age. But Jesus decided that his 
ministry should be sane. In the third struggle, 
he put away the kingly crown. He would not 
be the popular political warrior Messiah, con- 
quering all the kingdoms of the world, but would 
accomplish his spiritual ends by spiritual means. 
Thus he definitely repudiated all ideas of political 
Messiahship and broke with the expectations of 
the vast majority of the people. And this was 
final. On this point, he never wavered nor com- 
promised. 

Having made these decisions, he went forth 
calm and yet in deadly earnest to do his work 
in his own way. The keenness of moral insight, 
the practical largeness of view, and the strength 
of character evinced in what is called the Temp- 
tation must not escape us. Nor should we forget 
that the life principles here disclosed are given 
us, in all probability, in the words of Jesus him- 
self, who could have been the only reporter, and 
that he made the report many months after the 
occurrence. These considerations strengthen our 



68 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

belief that Jesus not only made these decisions 
at the beginning, but consciously recognized them 
as determining the character of his ministry 
throughout. 

Jesus had principles then, but no elaborate 
plan of action. He was mostly an opportunist, 
allowing himself to be led by events, for in them 
he saw his Father's hand. Yet, in great crises, 
after long and earnest prayer, he boldly took the 
initiative. His last journey to Jerusalem is a 
striking illustration. From the first also he de- 
cided that preaching and teaching would be his 
method (cf. Mark i: 38, the Sower, the Tares 
and his actual career) and to that he clung to the 
very end. With his conception of his mission 
as that of bringing men into the blessings of his 
own experience of God, this was the only simple, 
honest thing to do. Moreover, he conceived that 
he ought to evangelize the whole Jewish nation 
and do a work in every province. So he was a 
teacher Messiah, a prophet Messiah in outward 
form at least, and, most naturally, began his 
work by assisting John the Baptist. 

But how could Jesus think and call himself 
the Messiah, when that name meant to the 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 69 

people something entirely different from what he 
intended to be? Was this pretending to be 
something which he was not? Must it not neces- 
sarily lead to tragic misunderstandings? We 
answer, To be sure, the literal points of exact 
agreement between the popular idea of the Mes- 
siah and Jesus were reduced to one, viz.: — that 
the Messiah would work miracles. Jesus was 
neither warrior king nor, during his lifetime at 
least, apocalyptic judge. Yet he was God's spe- 
cial representative on earth; he came to bring 
salvation and found the kingdom of God and, 
if so, there was no other Jewish word to describe 
him except Messiah. Doubtless salvation and 
the kingdom of God had, in his thought, a higher 
and more spiritual meaning than they had in the 
thought of his contemporaries. Indeed he him- 
self belonged to a higher and more spiritual 
sphere than they had yet conceived, and there- 
fore was very different from the divine represen- 
tative whom they had expected. But there was 
no higher popular title to describe him than 
Messiah, and none so nearly fitted to set forth 
his appointed work. The only thing which he 
could do was to fill the word, Messiah, with the 



70 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

higher and simpler meaning, and this task Jesus 
undertook and accomplished with a heavenly 
wisdom. This attempt was justifiable and the 
result in a sense successful largely because popular 
ideas, on all these subjects, were loose and con- 
fused; Jesus' teaching and person were the con- 
crete realities which brought the open-minded to 
definiteness and decision. In short, Jesus and 
his mission found no human words or . concep- 
tions high enough or simple enough to express 
them, and he necessarily took the highest words 
and conceptions available and filled them with a 
new and higher content. In one sense, he was 
not the Messiah (of popular thought), but much 
more than the Messiah. 

If Jesus had not assumed Messiahship, men 
would have asked, What relation does your 
work bear to the Old Testament representations 
of the Messiah? Jesus could not have said, 
There will be no Messiah. He did say, I am the 
Messiah, the true Messiah is such as I. 

What has been said on this point does not 
imply that Jesus' idea that he was the Messiah 
involved the logical process just sketched. Rather 
as we showed in the last chapter, the idea sprang 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 71 

up in him spontaneously and necessarily. He 
could call himself nothing else, and never thought 
of calling himself anything else. I have simply 
explained why, and have justified Jesus' spon- 
taneous thought. 

Jesus also encountered the political difficulty. 
A political Messiah, a warrior Messiah, a king 
of the Jews, such as the people and especially 
the Zealots expected, would be a traitor to the 
Romans, would receive short shrift at their hands 
if unsuccessful, and, if successful, must lead an 
insurrection against them. All these ideas were 
abhorrent to Jesus, yet how could he call himself 
Messiah and not awaken these hopes and sug- 
gest these popular connotations? This was a 
vital and finally tragic problem for Jesus, and 
one to which he was constantly alive. In an 
atmosphere palpitating with Zealotism, he nat- 
urally never went about claiming to be the 
Messiah, as many seem to think, but always 
exercised a holy discretion and reserve on this 
point. 

We find that in consequence of the situation 
which we have described, Jesus does not begin 
by announcing his Messiahship, but by pro- 



72 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

claiming and explaining the kingdom of God. 
First, he preaches the spiritual kingdom, and 
then at last discloses himself as the spiritual 
king, for he thinks the cause of the righteousness 
of the kingdom is after all summed up in him 
(Matthew 5: 11). The kingdom was a common 
idea and meant the political Messianic kingdom. 
Jesus also meant by it the Messianic reign and 
realm; but, to emphasize its spiritual origin and 
character, called it the kingdom of God. This 
exact phrase is found only rarely, if at all, in the 
Old Testament and the prechristian Jewish litera- 
ture, but the idea itself is very common. 

Jesus' thought about the kingdom and sov- 
ereignty of God was just as much his own, just 
as independent of popular conceptions in its 
origin, just as clearly founded on his personal 
experience as his thought of Messiahship and is 
indeed the counterpart of it. It may be denned 
as follows: The Father was sovereign in his 
own heart and life. He had come to induce all 
men to accept this blessed sovereignty and to 
enjoy all the satisfactions and privileges of the 
Father's love. With him the Messiah, the Mes- 
sianic reign had come. The kingdom was within 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 73 

him. It was to be realized and set up on the 
earth now. Its full realization could, however, 
come only in the future when it should become 
universal, but men could now prepare themselves 
for the enjoyment of that future by change of 
mind and heart toward sin and toward God and 
righteousness. So the kingdom was both present 
and future. Yet the future was the more glorious 
and characteristic. The ethical conditions of 
sharing the Messianic blessing stripped it of the 
last shred of nationalism, took it out of politics 
and guaranteed its universal and spiritual nature. 
Yet, while beginning as an individual experience, 
it involved new social relations and indeed a new 
and heavenly society on this earth, a society in 
which the will of God would be done as perfectly, 
unanimously and joyously as in heaven itself. 
Jesus' work was not merely proclaiming and ex- 
plaining this kingdom, but also inducing men 
to receive it and enter into it, that is, founding 
the new society. 

But entirely apart from the political situation 
and the circle of narrow Jewish ideas in which 
Jesus found himself (i. e., apart from the political 
and pedagogical considerations), there was an- 



74 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

other reason why Jesus preached the kingdom 
first, and always more emphatically than the 
king. This reason is found in the very nature 
of his mission, is therefore of primary significance 
and would have been operative, if the other mo- 
tives had not existed. The kingdom is actually 
first in importance in his thought because the king- 
dom stood for the experience of blessing, present 
and future, into which he conceived himself di- 
vinely sent to bring men. See his equation of the 
kingdom and this experience of blessing in the 
Beatitudes, in the representation of the Messianic 
Feast, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in 
the formula, "the good news of the kingdom." 
To have put himself to the front would have con- 
fused men on this point, would have made them 
think that some belief about him (i. e., that he 
was the Messiah, with appropriate political ac- 
tion based on that belief) was more important 
than entrance into the new life of righteousness 
and faith. It would have been analogous to the 
mistake of his church in those ages when it has 
put the emphasis on an intellectual assent to the 
deity of Christ rather than on the new life he 
bade men lead. Still this experience of blessing 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 75 

was to be had only in union with him, it was the 
experience of his own heart which he wished to 
share with others. He was after all essential to 
it and to its vigorous and sustained development. 
In the end he could not be hid, the king as well 
as the kingdom must appear. 

Did he at first expect an immediate success in 
his enterprise? The evidence is inconclusive and 
the answer doubtful. Much is involved in the 
decision, yet it must be made. Else we can never 
gain clearness on the fundamental aspects of 
Jesus' career and must always walk in the mists. 
After long and painful wavering, I have finally 
come to believe that Jesus did at first expect 
immediate success, and on these grounds: — a. 
Luke 13: 6-9, the parable of the Barren Fig-tree, 
gets its whole point from the fact that the issue 
of the salvation of the Jewish people through 
Jesus' work is not yet certain, and with this the 
lament over Jerusalem, "How often would I have 
gathered thee" (Matthew 23: 37), is to be com- 
pared, b. The whole spirit of the early ministry 
seems to exhibit the expectation of a sweeping 
victory. Jesus seems at first even to have had 
hopes of at least the Galilean Pharisees (Luke 15: 



J 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

25-32). c. The historical and psychological dif- 
ficulties of the opposite view are almost insu- 
perable, d. This goes well with our statement 
in Chapter III about the gradual development 
of Jesus' Messianic consciousness. 

So we believe that he began his work with the 
greatest enthusiasm, though with some misgivings 
caused by the Temptation, and that he only 
slowly learned the bitter truth. Only toward 
the middle of his Galilean activity, was he finally 
convinced that his earthly ministry was doomed 
to comparative failure so far as immediate results 
were concerned and that he could accomplish his 
mission only through his death. Some may ask 
what would have happened if Jesus had had the 
success, which he at first anticipated. The in- 
quiry opens up vast reaches of possibilities, 
through which we cannot find our way. If the 
question ever came into Jesus' mind, he doubtless 
left all such future contingencies to his Father's 
love and wisdom. 

Jesus' popularity in Galilee was immediate 
and immense. Its basis was primarily the power 
and attractiveness of his personality, his moral 
and spiritual enthusiasm, the simplicity and sym- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 77 

pathy pi his heart, the fresh note of freedom, 
courage and hope. This was reinforced by the 
authority, plainness and common sense of his 
preaching, his miracles, especially those of heal- 
ing and casting out demons, and his alluring 
promises of Messianic blessings. Still, this popu- 
larity was hollow and Jesus soon saw its hollow- 
ness. The crowd was moved mostly by curiosity, 
wonder and a hope of external advantages from 
what they vaguely felt to be a Messianic move- 
ment. Only a comparatively few understood his 
message of a spiritual salvation in a spiritual 
kingdom, and soon they too were involved in 
misunderstanding and externalism. So difficult is 
it to get purely spiritual conceptions into men's 
minds. The parables of the Sower and the Tares 
evidence Jesus' recognition of the superficiality 
of this seeming success. 

During this period, as we have seen, he was 
engaged in explaining the nature of the kingdom, 
but did not openly or plainly declare his Messiah- 
ship. Rather he carefully concealed it. 1 Yet 

1 The seeming exceptions to this statement are to be explained 
from the peculiar geographical or personal circumstances involved 
in the particular case or possibly by the application of critical 
principles. 



78 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the authority with which he spoke and acted, 
his mighty miracles, the confessions of the de- 
mons, his forgiveness of sins, his superiority to 
John the Baptist who had announced the Coming 
One, his constant assertion that he was God's 
representative and an altogether extraordinary 
person, his authoritative proclamation of an im- 
minent, indeed a present Messianic kingdom, all 
filled the people with expectation and led them 
to surmise that this could be no other than the 
Messiah, different as he was from what they had 
anticipated the Messiah would be. 

The Galilean ministry consequently ended with 
an explosion of Zealotism, for which the train 
had long been laying. It is commonly called 
the Crisis at Capernaum. Its immediate causes 
were three events which occurred in closest con- 
nection: the Mission of the Twelve, who had not 
freed themselves from the idea of a political Mes- 
siah and who may have been more or less indis- 
creet in their preaching; the news of the murder 
of John the Baptist, which must have profoundly 
stirred the people against Herod Antipas and the 
Roman overlordship; and the Feeding of the Five 
Thousand. The result was that five thousand en- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 79 

thusiastic men, the nucleus for an effective army, 
attempted to seize Jesus and make him a king 
(a political Messiah). It was an hour of gravest 
peril for Jesus and the world, but he met the 
crisis with admirable decision. In the synagogue 
at Capernaum the next day, he explained to 
the people that he had no material blessings for 
them. He could give them only himself, the 
Bread of Life. Moreover, he intimated that he 
was going to die. The crowds deserted him; it 
looked as if even the Twelve might waver. His 
Galilean popularity was at an end. At the same 
time he finally broke with the Pharisees on the 
subject of clean and unclean meats, but that 
belongs to another chapter. 

Jesus now leaves Palestine, for some weeks at 
least, and wanders with his disciples in Gentile 
territory. They are alone, no multitudes follow 
him. He has been rejected both by the people 
and by the scribes. Not the slightest sign or 
prospect of political Messiahship remains. In 
these circumstances he asks his disciples for their 
opinion of him. Peter, their spokesman, declares 
him the Messiah in spite of it all. He founds this 
judgment not on any external mark of Messiah- 



80 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

ship, but only on what Jesus was in himself and 
the spiritual blessing he had brought to his fol- 
lowers. It was at last a confession of a spiritual 
Messiah, however confused with older ideas it 
might be. It was an epoch in Jesus' ministry and 
in the history of the kingdom. And Jesus clinched 
it with the definite announcement of his final re- 
jection, sufferings and death. This in principle 
absolutely put an end to all the old Messianic 
conceptions and hopes. A dying Messiah was no 
Messiah (in the old sense) at all. But Jesus added 
that all his followers must be ready for the cross 
as well as he. This was a bitter truth, fitted to 
cut the root of all externalism, pride and self- 
seeking, and to leave them nothing outside the 
spiritual sphere. 

There arises the difficult question how far 
Jesus had made known his Messiahship to the 
disciples before Peter's confession at Caesarea 
Philippi. The Fourth Gospel represents John 
the Baptist as pointing him out as Messiah, but 
this could have been only to a private circle of 
those who afterwards became apostles. This 
private circle, as well as John the Baptist, under- 
stood Messiahship, however, in the popular sense, 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 8 1 

more or less spiritualized, and were doubtless 
strictly charged not to speak of it in public (cf. 
Jesus' charge to the demonized, the leper, etc.). 
In the meantime we know that Jesus was adopt- 
ing the same method of instruction in private 
as in public, i. e., he was teaching a spiritual 
view of the kingdom rather than proclaiming 
himself the Messiah, but all the while his manner 
of life and teaching was nevertheless impressing 
his unique personality and mission. The great 
advance at Caesarea Philippi was an advance in 
the spiritual conception of the Messiahship, the 
founding of all Messianic claim on the spiritual 
nature and power of Jesus. Once discovered in 
the disciples by Jesus, this was reinforced and 
deepened by the teaching of the cross. Only this 
view of an original belief of the disciples in Jesus' 
Messiahship, together with a growth in the dis- 
ciples' conception of it, can adequately explain 
the phenomena before the confession of Peter, 
especially their willingness to follow him, their 
joy in his presence, their clinging to him when all 
deserted him. If the people more than suspected 
that he was the Messiah, surely the disciples must 
have been certain of it. 



82 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Had Jesus from the first expected rejection 
and a violent death? In accord with the position 
already taken we must say that he had not. 
He had at first anticipated that Israel, as a 
whole, would accept him as its spiritual Messiah 
and with him all the blessings which he brought. 1 
Not without misgivings, however, for in the 
Temptation Jesus seems to have recognized and 
weighed the might and unalterable opposition 
of the forces which were bound to oppose him. 
The bitterness of his conflict with the scribes, 
and especially, his growing distrust of the en- 
thusiasm of the multitudes must have changed 
these misgivings into conviction. There could be 
only one end. He could not change nor abandon 
his mission, he must go on with his work, and 
the result, he clearly saw, must be his violent 
death. If so, he thought that his death must be 
the Father's will; but it could not mean failure; 
death must be only a means of victory, the climax 
of his earthly mission. This is the new experience, 

1 Yet both John the Baptist and Jesus always despaired of the 
ruling Sadducaic-Pharisaic clique at Jerusalem and of legalistic 
Judaism. Their only hope was that the people as a whole would 
leave Judaism and come over to the new spiritual kingdom, in 
which Jesus would spiritually rule. 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 83 

the new revelation which came to Jesus in the 
middle of his ministry. He must save the world 
by dying for it. He must bring it to know God 
and his richest blessings by the sacrifice of him- 
self. Thus he would redeem from the power of 
sin all who received him and followed him as the 
dying Savior, and his death would lay the foun- 
dation of a new covenant, a new society, a new 
Israel. 

Part II 

And here we meet the most difficult problem 
of all. Jesus now saw that the future and more 
glorious kingdom lay beyond his death. Yet he 
was perfectly certain that he had been called 
to found that kingdom by the impartation of his 
own inner experience of communion with God. 
He was sure that the kingdom would come and 
in his mind it was axiomatic, nay almost a matter 
of definition, that the kingdom could not come 
without him. Indeed a Messianic reign without 
a Messiah was to him unthinkable. Now Jesus in 
common with all Pharisaic Jews believed in the 
life beyond death, and he had no doubt that from 
the cross he would go to the Father; indeed many 



84 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Jews believed that the Messiah was hidden with 
God. With these thoughts in the background, we 
can easily see how Jesus, after accepting the 
tragic outcome of his earthly life, became convinced 
that he would survive death in the spiritual world, 
would reign at the Father's right hand, would 
personally inaugurate the more glorious kingdom 
on earth and rule in it as king. This more glori- 
ous kingdom would only be his own blessed ex- 
perience of God now become universal and effec- 
tive in human hearts and human society. All 
this was only another evidence of his supreme 
confidence in his God-given mission and its ulti- 
mate triumph. Indeed this thought of Jesus 
rests on two universal principles: — every divine 
impulse in humanity is sure of final victory; and 
every great moral and spiritual movement under 
the best conditions centers about a personality, 
who is its fountain of life and power. As a mat- 
ter of fact, Jesus has been the source of spiritual 
energy to his followers for twenty centuries, is 
today the rallying point of their hope, and the 
ground of their unyielding faith in final triumph. 
Jesus from the beginning had never for a mo- 
ment compromised with the political, nationalistic 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 85 

Messianism of his day, but did he, on the other 
hand, in the idea of his Coming, accept in part 
at least the apocalyptic idea of the Messiah? 
The answer must be a modified "yes," if we hold 
to our Gospel data (cf. p. 2of.). There is no 
evidence that Jesus ever read any of the current 
apocalypses of his day, but these apocalyptic 
ideas were common among the people, springing, 
as they did, out of the Book of Daniel, which 
was a part of their Bible. As one of the common 
people, with the Old Testament in his hand, 
Jesus was perfectly familiar with apocalyptic 
ideas. 

Jesus' favorite self-designation was Son of Man. 
Where did he get it? From Daniel 7: 13, 14. * 
To him it meant Messiah, especially in the role 
of Founder of the Kingdom of God. He loved 
the passage for three reasons at least, first because 
it represented the Messiah and his kingdom as a 
man over against the dreadful beasts, symbolizing 

1 Readers are urged to study the whole of Daniel 7. The old 
idea, still so common, that Jesus referred to his divine nature by 
the phrase Son of God, and to his human nature by the phrase, 
Son of Man, is no longer tenable. Both phrases meant Mes- 
siah, and were related to his Messianic character and mission. 
Certainly Jesus during his earthly life had no need to emphasize 
his humanity which was patent to everybody. 



86 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

world-empires. Unlike them he had no terrify- 
ing appearance or frightful weapons. It was their 
part to destroy and tear to pieces, but it was his, 
humanly, intelligently and peacefully, to construct 
a new society by spiritual means. The passage 
also appealed to him because it echoed his cer- 
tainty that this work and kingdom were given 
to him by God and, lastly, because it declared 
that his reign should be world-wide and eternal. 
In the conflicts, disappointments and crises of 
his life, this passage was to him a guiding star. 
He was that Son of Man. All the plots of his 
enemies against One with such a destiny were 
petty and temporary. 

Did Jesus by the use of the phrase, Son of 
Man, disclose his Messiahship to the people? 
This is a very difficult question, for, since Jesus 
often used the phrase publicly, it involves our 
whole conception of a period of reserve with 
reference to the Messiahship. The truth seems 
to be that by the common people among whom 
Jesus moved "Son of Man" would not be under- 
stood to mean Messiah, but would be to them a 
striking enigmatic phrase, provoking curiosity 
and inquiry as to what Jesus meant by it. Pos- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 87 

sibly in inner Scribal circles, it was more than a 
hint that he believed himself to be Messiah, and 
yet a hint of such a kind that they could scarcely 
seize upon it to his harm (cf. Son of Man, in 
Psalm 8, Ezekiel, Book of Enoch, and John 12: 34). 
The phrase, Son of Man, is derived from an 
apocalyptic passage, but may have meant to 
Jesus nothing more at first than what has already 
been stated (p. 85L). After he became convinced 
that the future Messianic kingdom lay beyond 
his death however, the apocalyptic phraseology 
became a part of Jesus' speech and perhaps in- 
fluenced his thought. As our records stand, 
Jesus plainly said that after his death he was 
coming on the clouds of heaven to judge the 
world and inaugurate the more glorious stage 
of the kingdom, and that this would occur before 
the end of the contemporary generation. This 
cannot be explained away by a candid exegesis. 
And yet, as a matter of fact, he did not so come 
in the life-time of that generation. The date 
and the apocalyptic manner of the Coming con- 
stitute two grave difficulties for modern men. 
There seem to be only two positions which may 
be taken. Either Jesus spoke as the records 



S8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

stand and was in error; this would change tradi- 
tional ideas about Jesus, possibly seriously. Or, 
to choose the other horn of the dilemma, the 
records are not trustworthy in this matter; the 
disciples, full of the political and apocalyptic 
Messianism, misunderstood Jesus. It is therefore 
a question between a mistaken Jesus and un- 
trustworthy records, or records untrustworthy at 
this point at least (cf. Mark 13 : 30 and parallels, 
Mark 9: 1 and parallels, Matthew 10: 23). 

In such a case, we must proceed from the 
known to the unknown. The gospels give us the 
Jesus, whom we have already presented, a Jesus 
great and commanding, profoundly spiritual in 
his views and teachings, simple, sane, independ- 
ent, certain of himself, his mission and his Father. 
Nothing which impugns this character, so naively 
and simply drawn and yet so wonderfully complex 
and unique, can be true. As to the date, "in 
that generation," it may be said that such an 
error is incidental and external, merely in the 
intellectual sphere, and that it is not inconsistent 
with the honesty or spiritual greatness of Jesus. 
He was perfectly certain that he was Messiah. 
The Messiah was to appear at the end of the 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 89 

age. He had appeared. The end was near. It 
was the error of a hero of faith, filled with the 
thought of the time. Or, if this does not satisfy 
us, it is open to us to say that Jesus predicted 
the coming of the Spirit, the destruction of 
Jerusalem, the victory of his church and his own 
personal Coming, the first two at least in that 
generation; and that the disciples, obsessed with 
apocalyptic notions, unconsciously transferred 
this date to his personal Coming, and gradually 
emphasized his Coming out of all due propor- 
tion. 

As to the apocalyptic form, "in the clouds of 
heaven," it may be said that the catastrophic 
feature of it is not inconsistent with modern 
theories of evolution in biology or history. Geol- 
ogy now knows catastrophic periods. The burst- 
ing of spring, the emergence of the butterfly, 
the birth of the child, are all catastrophic and 
each brings in a new age. A few years or months 
or even days have often changed the whole course 
of history, and similarly have produced new 
eras. Nor is such an idea, when rightly con- 
ceived, inconsistent with Jesus' teaching of the 
gradual growth of the kingdom in other passages. 



90 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Gradual growth often ends in a catastrophic 
consummation. Why not in the case of the king- 
dom? 

Nor are we to think that Jesus changed his 
fundamental spiritual attitude and conceptions 
when he adopted the apocalyptic form. He who 
employed the Jewish ideas of kingdom and Mes- 
siah to express himself to his followers, yet re- 
moulded them for his own uses, filled them with 
a new content, and partially transferred them to 
the present, did not fall a foolish victim to 
apocalyptic mania; but, when the new idea of 
final spiritual victory in spite of death demanded 
assertion, he did as he had done before, he took 
the apt apocalyptic form, familiar to all Jews, 
and through that taught them figuratively things 
which he could not have expounded literally and 
definitely. 1 Indeed the latter course would have 
been inadequate and ineffective, and therefore 
stupid in the circumstances. And when we note 
Jesus' free use of parable and metaphor, the 
figurative nature of the Daniel passage itself 

1 In fact, there may have been sayings of Jesus, capable of 
explaining much along this line, which, not being understood 
by the disciples, disappeared before they found a place in the 
tradition. 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 9 1 

from which "the clouds of heaven" are derived, 1 
when we study how Jesus himself reported his 
baptism and temptation, and his vision of the 
fall of Satan in Luke 10: 18, it is open to those 
of us, who wish to do so, to explain the form of 
the Coming "on the clouds of heaven" as figura- 
tive, the form, but not the substance: the figure is 
the figure of something. 

If we can no longer be satisfied with the literal 
"Coming in clouds," we may therefore believe 
that Jesus taught that towards the end of that 
generation or, possibly, at some indefinite future 
time, there would occur a spiritual event in hu- 
man history, so wonderful that all would sense 
it beyond mistake, so plain that all would recog- 
nize its significance, so mighty as to inaugurate a 
new age and judge and destroy all hostile forces, 
so personal as to constitute for his people and all 
others a coming of Christ Jesus himself, his final 
triumph, the climax and consummation of his 
Messianic work. This event must be conceived 
as still future, for its chief characteristic is that 
it will usher in an age when God's will shall be 

x Note that, throughout the whole Bible, the "cloud" is the 
constant symbol of the manifested presence of God. 



92 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

done on earth as it is done in heaven. Come 
quickly, even so, come, Lord Jesus. 

From the time of Cassarea Philippi, Jesus' prin- 
cipal thought was to complete his Messianic 
work by his death at Jerusalem (cf. p. 82f.). On 
the way to the capital, he evangelized Perea. 
This Perean ministry followed the lines of the 
earlier ministry in Galilee, but was briefer, more 
decisive and solemn. He now knew that nothing 
which occurred in Perea could change the final 
result. 

At the end of the Perean ministry, he entered 
Jerusalem with a Passover throng of Pereans and 
Galileans. Contrary to his usual custom, Jesus 
had carefully planned this Triumphal Entry. 
It was a public announcement of his Messiah- 
ship, and a demand that he be received as Mes- 
siah by the nation and its official leaders. He 
could not allow any misunderstanding on that 
point at the end. If he is to die, he will die as a 
rejected Messiah. 

Some have thought that Jesus here compro- 
mised with the idea of political Messiahship, or at 
least gave his followers that impression. It may 
be conceded that this was the view of the multi- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 93 

tude, but Jesus is not to blame. He had done 
everything to make them think otherwise. We 
cite his whole ministry and teaching of a spiritual 
kingdom up to this time and, especially, his de- 
cisive action in the crisis at Capernaum; the 
peaceful emblem of the ass and the fact that 
his followers had no weapons but palm branches, 
cf. John 18: 36; Jesus' tears and lament over 
Jerusalem (Luke 19: 41-44) which was not about 
to be saved by a conquering Messiah, but about 
to be destroyed by its enemies; and, lastly, his 
failure to follow up the Triumphal Entry by 
energetic measures. At any rate, the people 
were soon to be undeceived by his words about 
tribute to Caesar and by the cross. 

During Passion week, he was asked about pay- 
ing tribute to the Roman government. It was a 
crucial question. If he should fall in with the 
popular view of his Zealot followers and take sides 
against paying tribute, he would immediately be 
involved in a nationalistic political movement, 
which could mean nothing else than treason to 
Rome, and, therefore, either success as a warrior 
Messiah or a traitor's death. If, on the other 
hand, he should advise paying tribute, he would 



94 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

appear a traitor to the dearest national hopes, 
and would take the heart out of the once more 
enthusiastic multitude. He did not hesitate a 
moment. He chose the latter course, which left 
him without enthusiastic friends, but left his 
enemies without a charge which they could prefer 
against him before the Roman governor. 

This was a source of the most serious embar- 
rassment to the Jewish leaders. Even before 
their own court, dependent as it was on the 
Romans, they were at a loss for a charge against 
this simple preacher and prophet. Finally, they 
condemned him to death for blasphemy, on his 
confession of his Messiahship. Yet they could not 
execute their own sentence, but must hand him 
over to the Romans, and blasphemy was not a 
capital charge in a Roman court. They, there- 
fore, charged Jesus before Pilate with claiming 
to be a political Messiah ("Christ a king," 
Luke 23: 2, cf. Mark 15: 2) despite his answer 
about the tribute. Pilate is not inclined to take 
seriously such a charge against this simple but 
impressive peasant, and, after Jesus' private 
explanation that his kingdom is not of this world 
(John 18: 36), is convinced of his innocence, and 



HOW JESUS HANDLED MESSIANISM 95 

yields finally only to political pressure and self- 
interest. 

It is to be noted that Jesus died rather than 
deny that he was the Messiah. The solemn cir- 
cumstances of his final confession (Mark 14: 60- 
64 and parallels) have already been described 
(p. 36L) but must be repeated here. He stood 
before the supreme court of his nation; the re- 
ligious and political head of the nation, the High 
Priest, put the question; Jesus was under oath; 
he knew that on his answer depended his life or 
death. He might have explained or equivocated, 
but he did neither. He said, "I am the Mes- 
siah," and more, "you shall one day believe it, 
when you stand before my judgment seat, as I 
now stand before yours." The charge made be- 
fore Pilate shows that he was condemned as a 
political Messiah, a traitor to Rome. And the 
title on the cross, the bitter sarcasm of the un- 
willing but weak judge, completes the proof of it. 
It was a false charge, and both the Sanhedrin 
and Pilate knew it. Still Jesus had laid himself 
open to it by applying to himself the Messianic 
title in a sense different from that in which it 
was popularly used. 



96 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

We have noticed in Chapter III that, in the 
development of Jesus, his sense of a blessed, 
intimate, unique filial relation to God was the 
root of his belief that he was the Messiah. And 
although that belief was inevitable to him in his 
environment, and necessary to his self-expression, 
still it must be said that the Messianic title was 
inadequate, and always likely to be misunderstood. 
He was Messiah in his own sense, and he was not 
Messiah in the popular sense. He was Messiah, 
but he was more than Messiah. He was a per- 
sonage greater than the race had ever known or im- 
agined before. The large prominence which Jesus 
gave to the idea of the kingdom, and his remark- 
able reserve in using the word, Messiah, along with 
his evident consciousness of his own greatness, 
show that he himself was fully aware of all this. 
We do not now need the Messianic title to explain 
him. Indeed the title is Jewish, belongs to a past 
age and needs itself to be explained. The Church 
has been divinely guided in relegating it to history, 
and, for popular impression, calling him the Son of 
God and the Savior of the world. And yet, had 
he not used the title, we might never have seen 
that he was far greater than all that it implied. 



CHAPTER V 

HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 

The Judaism of Jesus' day was a retrogression 
from the religion of the Old Testament, especially 
from the high level of the prophets and the nobler 
psalms. It so exaggerated the ceremonial and 
legal at the expense of the moral and religious 
in the scriptures that almost the whole reli- 
gious interest centered in the keeping of a set 
of precepts. Religion thus became externalized, 
mechanical, superficial, burdensome. Obedience 
to the letter of the law bade fair to become the 
whole of piety. Communion with God faded out 
of popular thought and language. The inevitable 
tendency was to foster self-righteousness, pettiness, 
hypocrisy, casuistry, and downright immorality. 
This system we call Legalism. 1 

The Pharisees were the especial exponents of 
this system, the perfect patterns of legalistic 
piety. They were the leaders of the people, and 

1 See p. 261. on the Pharisees and Legalism. 
97 



98 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

generally admired and reverenced for their pains- 
taking performance of the law. Yet we must not 
overdraw the picture. There were many devout 
men in Israel, who cherished true religion and 
an earnest morality even in that legalistic age. 
Not all the Pharisees themselves were hypocrites. 
There were great souls among them, like Hillel, 
Gamaliel, and Saul of Tarsus, but, as the last 
named said after his conversion, they were on the 
wrong track. The fact is that the Pharisees and 
their sympathizers had about all the religion 
that was left in Israel. At the time of the Mac- 
cabean uprising, true piety was like to perish 
from the earth, but the predecessors of the Phari- 
sees saved it in that crisis by magnificent devotion 
and heroism. Pharisaism has been the backbone 
of Judaism from the days of Jesus until now, a 
potent though isolated force. Still most of the 
leading Jerusalem Pharisees of his time were all 
that Jesus painted them, proud, self-righteous, 
hypocritical, covetous and immoral. 

Jesus nourished his soul on the Old Testament, 
which he knew thoroughly and quoted with 
perfect ease. He found in it a divine revelation. 
He never had a thought of setting up a new 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 99 

religion with no root in the old. The Old Testa- 
ment was his Bible, he recognized his Father in 
its God, and all he ever said which goes beyond 
the Old Testament was a natural outgrowth 
from it. It is probably true that in a general 
way he even accepted the Pharisaic theology 
except in those points in which he criticized it. 
The law and the prophets, as interpreted by the 
scribes, were the background of his life and 
thought. Indeed Jesus was brought up in the 
atmosphere of Pharisaism. Doubtless his rela- 
tives belonged to the circle of the Devout, and 
he breathed the freer air of Galilee, but the Phari- 
see was even there the beau ideal of the good 
man, and he himself would naturally have been 
of the same mind. 

But, although growing to maturity in such an 
environment, Jesus was the instinctive foe of 
legalism. The simplicity, freedom, freshness and 
joy of his spiritual life, his unerring moral in- 
sight, the breadth of his mind, the universality 
of his sympathies, and the greatness of his per- 
sonality were entirely out of harmony with the 
Pharisaic system. He could not be cramped and 
bound by that strait-jacket. He was sure to 



IOO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

rebel. The clash was inevitable and the breach, 
once made, could never be closed. 

Jesus began his Galilean ministry and laid 
the foundation of his popularity by casting out a 
demon on the Sabbath day and healing a leper 
by a touch. These unlawful acts led the Phari- 
sees to begin to watch him, and we can trace 
the history of their feelings through the stages 
of surprise, suspicion, criticism, bitter opposi- 
tion and conspiracy to kill. These stages Jesus 
met by explanation, argument, demonstration 
(Mark 2: 1-12), appeal to better feeling and 
common sense, finally, however, by aggressive 
assault, open break and denunciation. Jesus' 
initial attempts to win at least the Galilean 
Pharisees are too frequently disregarded, but 
can be plainly seen in his first mild replies (Mark 
2: 1-22, Luke 5: 39, 7: 36-50), and his tactful 
invitation to the Pharisees to come in and share 
the joy of the new kingdom (Luke 15: 25-32). 
It is clear that the Pharisees began the conflict 
by criticising Jesus and trying to force him to 
respect their views. Finally, however, Jesus 
carried the war into their territory, and with 
astonishing boldness attacked the whole system 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM IOI 

of legalism, denouncing its advocates as hypo- 
crites, worthy of the condemnation of God. 

Jesus objected to the fundamentals of legalism: 
(i) to its externality, its conception of religion 
as a round of outward duties and ceremonies, its 
careful washing of the outside of the cup, but 
neglect of the things of the heart within; (2) to 
its lack of a real distinction between duties, all 
being in its view equally important as equally 
involving obedience to the law, until at last the 
pettiest prescriptions got the most attention, and 
ethics as well as true religion bade fair to be 
ignored; (3) to its casuistry, its endless hair- 
splitting, which rotted the very fibre of sincerity 
and candor, inevitably tended to hypocrisy and 
double-dealing and was a convenient and oft- 
used cloak for covetousness and lust; (4) to its 
burdensomeness, its impossible exactions, a heavy 
yoke which men were unable to bear and which 
banished all the spontaneity and joy of a genuine 
religion; (5) to its exclusiveness, its contempt for 
those who did not attain its standard, its critical 
censorious attitude, its remorseless condemna- 
tions, its holier-than-thou spirit; (6) to its self- 
righteousness, pride and ostentation, springing 



102 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

out of its superficial externalism and exclusive- 
ness. Since Jesus got through with this feature 
of Pharisaism, self-righteousness has never been 
good form. It has. never recovered from the 
mortal blow he gave it, though under the guise 
of self-salvation it has again attained quite a 
vogue. (7) Jesus also objected to the legalists' 
thought of God, as a mere law-giver and judge, 
stern and unsympathetic, more concerned with 
the maintenance of law than with the salvation 
of men. Indeed Pharisaism so filled the whole 
horizon with the thought of the law, that the 
idea of God and immediate relation to him was 
shoved into the background. 

No wonder that the Pharisees rejected John the 
Baptist and Jesus, whose religion was, in direct 
contradistinction to theirs, a religion of the heart, 
of the inner man; of indifference to ritual and 
ceremony in comparison with justice, mercy, faith 
and love to God; a religion of great principles 
of action, lived out in all sincerity, joy and free- 
dom; of sympathy, self-sacrifice and love for the 
weak and the fallen. Jesus put his seal of ap- 
proval on the humble heart, filled with a sense of 
its need, and hungering and thirsting after right- 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM I03 

eousness. His teaching of the Good Shepherd 
seeking the lost sheep and of the free forgiveness 
of prodigals, denied the fundamental premise of 
Pharisaism, i. e., that men could and must de- 
serve and earn salvation by a record of external 
good works; and established forever the doctrine 
of God's grace or undeserved favor toward the 
repenting sinner. Right in line with this, he 
emphasized the thought of God, his nearness 
and love, his sympathy with men, and put the 
name, Father, into the foreground in all his speech. 
To Jesus' mind, fellowship with the Father was 
the most valuable and important thing in religion. 
The whole manner of Jesus' teaching corre- 
sponded to his inner spirit. The Pharisaic teachers 
were really lawyers. Everything with them was 
second hand. They dealt in quotation, tradition, 
precedent. They were mere echoes of the Old 
Testament and the decisions of earlier scribes. 
They were always debating the same old ques- 
tions of casuistry. They prided themselves on 
being cisterns, rather than springs. Jesus, on 
the other hand, was independent, fresh and orig- 
inal, a prophet rather than a lawyer. The people 
soon discovered that he spoke on his own initia- 



104 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

tive and not as the scribes. He did not quibble 
or debate, but poured out of a great soul words 
of life and power. He did not deal with the mi- 
nutiae of conduct, but with the basic principles 
of action. He did not preach the letter that 
killed all freedom and joy, but the life-giving 
Spirit. Here was a new voice, a new method, a 
new gospel and a new tone of authority. 

Jesus clashed with the Pharisees not only on 
the fundamentals, but also on the inferences and 
practical details of legalism. 

The Pharisees had built up a whole system of 
traditional interpretation of the law, which they 
considered of equal validity with the law itself, 
and in practice more important. This tradition, 
as it was called, corresponds to the body of legal 
precedents and judicial decisions, which plays so 
great a part in our own courts. It originated in 
the desire to apply the law to all the innumerable 
vicissitudes of life, and was to a certain extent 
inevitable to a legal system, which lay back of 
the life of a people. The trouble was that its 
framers in the multiplicity of applications lost 
sight of great leading principles, and that this 
law was religious as well as social. As a result, 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 105 

life was fettered just where it most needed to be 
spontaneous and free, and the tradition in many- 
cases was a glaring reversal of the true spirit of 
the law. It was only "a tradition of men," any- 
way, and could not rightly be proclaimed as 
divine in its sanctions and obligation. Jesus did 
not feel bound by it. He repudiated its authority, 
and, what was more to the point, the authority 
of its makers, the scribes. 

The law of the Sabbath was the masterpiece 
of the scribes for particularity, casuistry, ab- 
surdity and downright oppression. It aimed to 
decide in a binding way every possible question 
of conduct on the Sabbath. In the end, it was 
such a maze of disjointed precepts that no ordi- 
nary person could even keep it in mind; it made a 
good memory a prime prerequisite of piety. Jesus 
let in the light of religious common sense, founded 
all on the principle of a Sabbath made for man, 
appealed to the fair-mindedness of his hearers 
against Pharisaic bigotry and severity, and al- 
ways won the day with the common people. 

Jesus also opposed the whole teaching of cere- 
monial defilement, the law of clean and unclean. 
This was a peculiarly external piece of legal 



106 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

mechanism, applied especially to foods, but also 
to touching unclean persons and things, — Gentiles 
and dead bodies, for instance, — and involved 
endless purificatory washings. Jesus seems to 
have openly disregarded it from the first. He 
ate with unclean publicans and sinners, allowed 
a sinful woman to touch him, himself touched a 
leper, and was careless about his ceremonial 
ablutions before meals. All these things he de- 
fended on the ground of his love for the lost and 
the necessity of saving them, and, as to clean 
and unclean foods, he practically denied the dis- 
tinction and abolished that whole section of the 
law, declaring in general that legalism was a 
plant which his heavenly Father had not planted, 
and that it was bound for the ditch of destruc- 
tion (Mark 7: 1-23 and parallels). 

This last item brings up the whole question of 
Jesus' attitude towards the Old Testament Law. 
Jesus kept the law, both ceremonial and moral, 1 
except as hereinafter indicated, and even bade 
his disciples keep the tradition too when not in- 

1 As a preliminary to the discussion it should be said, that how- 
ever useful and justifiable the modern distinction between the 
moral and the ceremonial law may be, neither Jesus nor anybody 
else in New Testament times ever clearly made it. 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM 107 

consistent with morality (Matthew 23: 2). Only 
thus could he have gotten the ear of the people 
in that legalistic age. He was really more revolu- 
tionary in teaching than in conduct. Indeed he 
was at heart conservative in the best sense. To 
him the Old Testament was a revelation of right- 
eousness. He felt that it was all summed up in 
love to God and love to man. He founded his 
whole life and teaching upon it. He maintained 
and exalted the moral law as no one before him 
had ever done. On the other hand, while he 
generally kept the ceremonial law, he laid no 
emphasis on it, treated it with indifference, and 
evidently took no interest in it. 

Did Jesus in any particular abrogate the Old 
Testament law? The first chapter of the Sermon 
on the Mount (Matthew 5: 17-48) is often cited 
in proof that he did. To be sure, we here see 
Jesus assuming authority as a teacher that puts 
him above Israel's great Law-giver. "Moses said 
thus and so to those of old times, but I say unto 
you." Yet Jesus begins the first great section of 
the Sermon by declaring that he had not come 
to destroy the law by loose interpretation, that 
the moral content of every least precept must 



108 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

come to fruition, that he had come however to 
fill the law with deeper meaning and to carry it 
on to a new stage of development, and this, in 
5: 21-48, he proceeds to do with a consciousness 
of power and profundity of moral insight which 
has been the wonder of the ages and secures the 
assent of every heart. It cannot be truly said 
that in this chapter Jesus abrogates the law. He 
deepens it, and makes it more positive and 
spiritual. 

In the matter of the Sabbath, Jesus broke ex- 
plicitly only with the scribal tradition, but the 
spirit of his teaching and the implications of his 
principles do certainly abrogate the severer and 
more particularistic Sabbath precepts of the Old 
Testament as well, and are inconsistent with 
much of the Old Testament point of view on the 
subject. The story of the man who gathered 
sticks on the Sabbath (Num. 15: 32-36), for 
instance, is certainly not in line with the spirit 
of Jesus. 

On the subject of divorce, Jesus appealed from 
the laxity of Moses, whom he excuses, to the more 
fundamental teachings of Genesis and Malachi. 
Fasting, to be sure, is only rarely prescribed in 



HOW JESUS HANDLED LEGALISM I09 

the old scriptures, but Jesus would make it en- 
tirely voluntary, the expression of a spiritual 
mood. 

There can however be no doubt or equivoca- 
tion with reference to Jesus' attitude on the sub- 
ject of clean and unclean. This is an Old Testa- 
ment prescription. He not only disobeyed it by 
touching a leper, but distinctly abrogated the 
whole code, so far as it had to do with food at 
least. He here spoke as if superior to the Old 
Testament, and acted as though he were Lord 
in the sphere in which it had hitherto ruled 
supreme. 

How can we reconcile his love and honor for 
the Old Testament, with this implied and open 
abrogation of parts of it? The answer is that he 
did not look on the Old Testament as a set of 
external precepts, a legal code, but he penetrated 
to its inner character and meaning. It was to 
him a book of religion. It was a revelation of 
God, of righteousness, of love, of hope. As such 
he honored and loved it. "It was as if he had 
skipped the temporary in the scriptures in the 
reading, so little did it interest or busy him." 
He was not a revolutionary, he built on the old; 



110 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

but he was a progressive, he went on to the new. 
Yet he loved more to dwell on the old in the new 
light, than to set the new against the old as 
something opposite and antagonistic. Indeed he 
never did this except when forced to it. He was 
instinctively conscious of genetic and evolutionary 
connections, but when the old had had its day 
and stood squarely in the way of the new, he 
decisively swept it aside. 



CHAPTER VI 

JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 

Jesus is rightly called "The Great Teacher," 
for, in the realm of religion and morals, he is 
absolutely supreme. The profounder side of life 
is his chosen sphere. He taught men how to 
live richly, deeply, nobly. "He made religion a 
new thing and transfigured the religious life." 
Yet it must always be remembered that he was 
not a teacher only or principally. He was also a 
man of character and a man of action. He 
founded the Kingdom of God. What he was, 
what he taught, and what he did, together con- 
stitute his title to be called Savior and Lord. 

The originality of Jesus' teaching is not ab- 
solute. If it had been, it would have been par- 
tial and one-sided. Indeed he never claimed 
originality, but frankly founded his teaching on 
the great religious conceptions of the Old Testa- 
ment. Many of his ideas may be found in the 
contemporary Jewish literature, rare grains of gold 
in heaps of sand, and in the works of Graeco- 



112 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Roman and Oriental sages, who lived before him. 
Yet it is most improbable that Jesus had ever 
read any of these sages or even heard of the most 
of them. He and they were dealing with essen- 
tially the same subject, and an occasional simi- 
larity in thought or speech is not at all strange. 
Yet in almost all these parallels, Jesus is the pro- 
founder, the more comprehensive or the more per- 
fect in form. In fact, it seems as though in these 
other teachers, we see candles throwing their light 
out into the darkness, while Jesus gathers up all 
their partial truths with his own into one incandes- 
cent shaft of light, which turns the night into day. 
Yet, in the large sense, Jesus' originality is in- 
contestable. It consisted of four elements. The 
first was his matchless insight into the human 
heart, its motives and its needs. Those pure and 
loving eyes searched the depths of the soul, and he 
knew how to recreate men by the touch of truth 
and power. We wearily turn thousands of pages 
of pre-christian and non-christian literature to 
find a few gleams of such quick and sure intuition, 
as give every paragraph of Jesus' teaching real 
worth. Again, we wonder at his sense of propor- 
tion and relative value, which leaves the impres- 



JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 113 

sion of unequalled sanity and penetration. This 
is all the more remarkable since the legalistic 
system of his day had lost all sense of balance, 
and was as badly awry and out of plumb as any 
system intelligent men have ever known. But with 
infallible accuracy, Jesus put first things first, and 
never failed to get at the inner principle, at the very 
root of the problem. The best illustrations of this 
are his discovery of active love as the guiding prin- 
ciple of a true life, and his indissoluble combination 
of religion and ethics, while reserving to religion 
a certain primacy, in his famous summing up of 
duty as love to God and love to man. This 
fine balance of duties to God and man is the 
profoundest and most valuable contribution to 
ethics ever made. Add to this, as a third element, 
a deep seriousness and unexampled moral earnest- 
ness, and we shall understand something of the 
impression of power, which his words give to 
every generation, a spirit and life which takes 
them out of the realm of the speculative and 
theoretical, and makes them a positive practical 
force in the world with a peculiar penetrative 
quality. His teaching is its own best praise. 
Its effect is the self-evidencing proof of its unique 



114 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

character. Lastly, he was conscious of a sort of 
final authority. The tone of certainty rings in 
every utterance. God had sent him. A life 
built on his sayings is built on rock. The Judg- 
ment Day itself will not budge it an inch. If 
John the Baptist is the greatest of the prophets, 
he is more. 

When we turn to examine Jesus' way of teach- 
ing, we see immediately that he never thought of 
constructing an ethical or theological system. 
He was the very reverse of methodical. Rather 
he was occasional, fragmentary, practical. He 
seized every opportunity for inculcating his truth. 
He used the language of the common man and 
his thought moved along popular lines. He 
understood the value of the short pithy style, of 
illustration, of the story. His matchless parables 
reveal his delicate appreciation of the hidden 
harmonies of nature with the deeper things of 
the kingdom and of the human heart, his wonder- 
fully accurate observation of common life from 
every side, and his exquisite sympathy with men, 
birds, fields, sea and sky. He used the acted 
parable with equal power, as when he washed 
the disciples' feet for a lesson on loving service, 



JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 115 

presented the deepest things of his religion under 
the symbolism of the Lord's Supper, or withered 
the fig tree by the wayside. Along with the 
striking and beautiful parabolic form, he was the 
master of spiritual apothegms. They stick in 
the mind like burs in the clothing, and he meant 
they should. The world will never forget the 
Golden Rule, his summons to supplication, "Ask 
and ye shall receive," and his high ideal, "Be 
ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect;" 
while the Lord's Prayer seems ideal in brevity, 
simplicity, comprehensiveness, spirituality and 
uplifting power. He is often almost poetic, in- 
dulges in hyperbole, sometimes argues by the 
extreme case, and is never careful to define with 
exactness. There is nothing scholastic about 
him, he is never fanciful or flat like the scribes, 
but there is in him an elemental freshness, sanity 
and understanding which give his words a per- 
petual interest and charm. The reason is not 
far to seek. What he taught had not been learned 
from books, nor from other men, but was the 
expression of a constant inner experience of 
unique fellowship with his Father, and of a soul 
strong in love and purity. His heart spoke to 



1. 1 6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

men's hearts with a directness, lucidity and sim- 
plicity absolutely unrivalled in the history of the 
world. And it went home and it goes home, 
because in it men seem to hear the voice of all 
that is purest and best. Consequently, if we 
would correctly represent Jesus, we cannot 
analyze his teaching after the style of modern 
systematic ethics or traditional theology, but 
will attempt to describe it as it lay in his own 
mind, so far as our fragmentary sources will allow. 

The leading and unifying idea in Jesus' teach- 
ing is the Kingdom of God, a conception which he 
seized upon as the best expression of his experi- 
ence and the object of his mission, and which he 
more or less transformed. As the phrase only 
imperfectly corresponded with his deepest thought, 
however, he said many things, which he doubt- 
less did not consciously relate to it. Yet, as a 
matter of fact, nearly all his teaching may be so 
related without violence. 

This phrase contains the two leading religious 
ideas of Jesus, and the more important of the 
two in his mind was God. The earliest, deepest 
and most abiding element in Jesus' experience 
was his fellowship with God (cf. p. 47fl.). Out 



JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 117 

of this sprang the thought of his mission, and in 
it securely rested his whole life. Jesus' God was 
the God of the Old Testament, but he called 
this God Father. To be sure, this word is ap- 
plied to God in the Hebrew Scriptures, in his 
relation to Israel, to the theocratic king and 
classes of individuals, but Jesus, with his wonder- 
ful sense of proportion, exalted this title to the 
first place, individualized it, and gave it a warmer, 
richer, more intimate meaning. As Father, God 
loves, rules and cares for his children; and they 
on their part owe him, as their Father, rever- 
ence, supreme love, obedience and trust. God is 
not far off, despite what the legalistic system 
tended to teach men, but near at hand, and in- 
tensely interested in their salvation and all their 
highest good. This teaching of the Fatherliness 
of God is Jesus' greatest service in the revelation 
of God to man. Yet, as the very phrase "king- 
dom of God" shows, the Father was in Jesus' 
thought the King, 1 the Moral Governor of the 

1 Sometimes Jesus makes God king in the kingdom, and some- 
times represents himself as king. But there is no difficulty here. 
Just as the Davidic king was merely God's deputy in a state, 
which was essentially a theocracy, so Jesus is God's Messiah, 
and (deputy) king in the Messianic kingdom. 



Il8 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

world, to whom men are responsible and to whom 
they must give account. Jesus never imagined 
that the ideas Father and King could ever be 
thought inconsistent with each other. To him, 
God was the Father-King. God, he taught, was 
holy, supremely good, perfect in every moral 
excellence, the basis, norm, and end of moral 
character, the absolute guarantor of the victory 
of the kingdom. On this account, Jesus made 
no sharp distinction between religion and morals. 
He knew no religion which did not go out in 
active love to man, which was not instinct with 
the impulse of duty to humanity. He knew no 
morals, which were not founded in the idea of 
God, and which did not continually draw motive 
and inspiration from him. 

The Kingdom of God has already been ex- 
plained (cf. p. 72f.). It is first of all individual. 
That man has entered into the kingdom in whose 
willing and happy heart God has begun his blessed 
reign, and this is evidenced by the loving obe- 
dience of the man to God. "To be in the kingdom 
is to be with God," to repeat in kind, if not in 
degree, the experience of Jesus. Yet the future 
will be still more glorious and blessed. The 



JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 119 

kingdom has come, but is still to come, and the 
best is yet to be. It inevitably becomes social. 
These children of the kingdom will constitute a 
new and heavenly society on this earth, a society 
in which God will reign and which will do his 
will gladly and perfectly. 

This thought of the kingdom is one of the 
most important ever given to men. History is 
not a monotonous round of ever returning cycles. 
It is coming out somewhere. The world is tend- 
ing towards an ideal perfection, and that ideal 
gives it purpose and unity. God is not outside 
society, detached, vague and shadowy, but work- 
ing in it and through it, actively engaged in its 
development towards this most blessed consum- 
mation of a glad and universal obedience and 
fellowship. So the world is to find its final unity 
and final blessedness in God. Nothing gives the 
Christian such patience, strength and joy as this 
thought. 

This kingdom, Jesus taught, was of priceless 
worth to the individual and to society. It is a 
feast of blessings. In it he who sorrows over sin 
shall receive the peace and comfort of the divine 
mercy. He who hungers and thirsts after right- 



120 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

eousness shall have the solid satisfaction of real 
moral attainment. The cleansed in heart shall 
have the vision of God, and shall know the deep 
joy of the divine sonship. Through the power 
of gentleness, God makes them the heirs of the 
world. This is life and life more abundant. No 
sacrifice is too great to gain it. 

Jesus laid stress on the seriousness of the issue 
when the kingdom was offered men and they 
were invited to enter it. There were only two 
ways then, one led to life and one to death. 
That offer makes the supreme demand on men. 
To reject it even to gain the whole world is the 
most dreadful folly, for it means the rejection of 
the highest good — the throwing away of life 
itself. Better cut off the right hand or pluck out 
the right eye, than suffer such a final and irre- 
mediable loss. No more solemn words were ever 
spoken than those used by Jesus to emphasize 
and illustrate the gravity of this choice both for 
the individual and the nation. This note of the 
seriousness of life and its issues pervades the 
teaching of Jesus, and magnifies the value of 
the kingdom. 

Jesus came not only to teach men about the 



JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 121 

kingdom, but to induce them to come into it. 
In doing so he naturally laid down the conditions 
of entrance. These are variously stated and 
illustrated, but in each case the first step is 
repentance, by which Jesus meant a change of 
mind and heart and will towards sin and God. 
Looked at from the divine side, it is a new birth, 
the beginning of a God-given, new, and higher life. 

This repentance unto life means definitely 
quitting the old life of sin and selfishness and 
beginning to do the will of God, not from neces- 
sity or as a burden, or with legalistic particu- 
larism, but gladly and freely, with a real appetite 
for righteousness and service. Jesus' insistence 
on righteousness can hardly be overstated. It 
is the theme of the Sermon on the Mount and 
the lesson of his most public and striking act, 
the cleansing of the temple. Jesus knew nothing 
of any incongruity between love and righteous- 
ness. Love to him was a part of righteousness, 
and righteousness the indispensable quality of 
love. In his mind, justice underlies benevolence. 

This new life is the life of faith. Jesus saw the 
budding of faith in a consciousness of spiritual 
need, humility and the childlike qualities of 



122 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

teachableness and open-mindedness. Its flower 
was trust in God's willingness to pardon and to 
bless, and its fruit was a complete surrender, a 
renunciation of self and all that stands in the 
way of the new life, a supreme devotion to Jesus 
and a readiness to sacrifice everything, even life 
itself, in following him and doing God's will. 
Of the completeness of this surrender in faith 
Jesus could hardly speak more strongly than he 
does. 

This new life is also a life of love to God and 
man, and on this account must begin with the 
forgiveness of all who have done us wrong. 
Jesus is inflexible with reference to this initial 
test. Gentleness, mercy and peace are equally 
indispensable. Love is not merely benevolence, 
good will, but it is active beneficence, a real doing 
of good to all those about us. The children of 
the kingdom will, however, have a special affec- 
tion for all who follow Jesus and show a special 
kindness towards them, just because they are 
his and are therefore brethren in an especial sense. 

The condition of entrance into the kingdom 
is, then, repentance, a change from a life of self- 
ishness and sin to a life of righteousness, faith 



JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 1 23 

and love in the sense in which those words are 
used above. 

Now this new life is salvation. He who enters 
upon it and continues in it is saved, now and 
for all eternity. He is saved from irreverence, 
unbelief, aimlessness, selfishness, sensuality, and 
all their brood of vipers. He is saved to fellow- 
ship with God and Jesus and all good men, to 
purity, freedom, peace, joy and love. He is 
given an unshakable rock of confidence and the 
noblest of all purposes. He receives a new spir- 
itual and moral power, and triumphs in the hope 
of ultimate moral victory, not only for himself 
but for the race. If he fall, he shall not be 
utterly cast down, for the Lord shall make him 
to stand. The God who has bestowed upon him 
this wealth of blessing will not forsake his mercy 
towards him at any possible judgment day. Such 
is the teaching of Jesus. 

Let us now follow Jesus as he more particularly 
describes the life of the children of the kingdom. 
His primary insistence here is not on outward 
duties but on the inner life. It is heart religion 
which he demands. The kingdom of God is first 
of all a spiritual kingdom within men. Jesus 



124 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

begins at the center and works from within out- 
wards. He cleanses the life at its fountain head. 
With unerring insight, he goes to the very root 
of the matter. He searches out the hidden springs 
of action in the thoughts, motives and desires of 
men, and judges the outer conduct by the inner 
intent. All sin and all blessedness proceed out of 
the heart. It is the cleansed in heart who shall 
see God. This innerness is the unique quality in 
the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven. 

So Jesus puts truth first. He demands that a 
man shall be inherently honest with himself, and 
therefore, with others. There is nothing which 
he hates so much as a basic falseness, an uncon- 
scious but real hypocrisy. This subtle poison 
rots a man at the core. 

Such fundamental honesty assures moral in- 
tegrity. The man is no longer torn with conflict- 
ing emotions, conscience pulling one way and the 
desires the other. The purified will is the cap- 
tain of the ship and directs it right on in spite 
of storms. So life gets a unity in the one su- 
preme purpose of the loving heart to do God's 
will and finds a simplicity and peace which can- 
not be had in any other way. 



JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 125 

From this results Jesus' demand for spiritual 
independence, that men shall judge and choose 
in the spiritual realm for themselves, that they 
shall see things in the clear light of truth simply 
and as a whole, and that they shall act on the 
light they may gain. This is the root of that 
spiritual freedom which refuses to be bound by 
external authority, and is the mainspring of intel- 
lectual no less than religious progress. 

It is no wonder then that Jesus, who sees in 
the human heart the seat of morals and religion, 
should have exalted as no one before him the 
value of a man. Man, in his view, is incom- 
parably superior to inorganic nature and animals. 
Human rights always take precedence of property 
rights. He thought men well worth dying for. 
One human soul is worth more than a whole 
world of things. This is the source of the Chris- 
tian ideas of reverence for personality, of democ- 
racy, of the equality of the sexes, the rights of 
children, the Christian home, and the demand 
for a new social order. 

The life of the children of the kingdom, while 
fundamentally a life of honesty and independence 
in the spirit, is also the life of love. God loves 



126 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

his children, and they love him, their brethren in 
the kingdom, and all men, even enemies. God 
loves his children more than any earthly father 
can. He understands them, will care for them 
and protect them, will hear their cry, and stands 
ever ready to help them. Their welcome home 
when they come back to him as sinners shows 
what sort of a Father he is. Nor will he ever 
allow those who have trusted his love to perish. 
On this assurance, Jesus bases his teaching of 
immortality (Mark 12: 26f.). Yet this is no easy- 
going, indulgent love, indifferent to principle and 
the highest good of the children, but "the firm 
and steadfast administration of a holy household," 
where the Father is supreme and his spirit is the 
accepted law. 

Jesus' heart glowed with God's love for his own. 
He is the Good . Shepherd, who seeks and saves 
the lost even at the cost of his life. He identi- 
fies himself with his disciples most intimately. 
Those who reject them reject him, and those who 
do them the slightest kindness because they are 
his, do it to him. With jealous love he denounces 
his direst woes upon him who shall cause one of 
the least of them to fall into sin. He promises 



JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 1 27 

his continual presence with them. He will never 
fail them. 

God's children also will love. The first com- 
mandment and the second, too, is, "Thou shalt 
love." It is the law of the kingdom. They love 
God. This is the foundation of everything in the 
spiritual realm, underlies all thought, feeling and 
action. It is the first instinct of God's child, 
and carries with it trust, obedience and reverence. 

They love Jesus in whom they see the love of 
God. They follow and obey him at any cost of 
sacrifice or suffering. They stand by him, when 
all the world deserts him. They bring their 
precious ointment and pour it on his feet, and on 
his head, and he thinks that they do well. They 
lay down their lives for him and he thinks it 
fitting that they should. Again and again Jesus 
demands a love that shall be faithful unto death. 

They love their brethren in the kingdom, 
brethren indeed, joined by closer ties than those 
of the flesh, having the same experience of God's 
grace and Jesus' love, the same inspiring task, 
the same blessed hope. They love all men. Love 
of neighbor is the second great commandment. 
The Golden Rule, while essentially a rule of 



128 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

justice, is its practical principle. The neighbor 
is the man who needs us, whether friend, stranger, 
alien or enemy. Yes, Jesus requires his followers 
to love even enemies, who are actually striving 
to ruin and kill them. This love, however, is 
no sentimental feeling (we cannot enjoy our ene- 
mies), but an active doing of good. The chil- 
dren of the kingdom will be gentle, kindly in 
judgment, forgiving, compassionate, peacemakers, 
reverent in feeling towards personality, and will 
ever be giving to the very limits of gener- 
osity. 

Indeed, the condition of rank in the kingdom is 
not wealth, intellectual ability, power, or even 
length or difficulty of service, but a loving heart 
which ministers in a lowly spirit to the good of 
men. No one thing in this connection is more 
emphasized than this, and here Jesus presents 
himself as the great example. 

The life in the kingdom is presented from other 
points of view, all more or less related to those 
already mentioned. It is a life of sexual purity; 
Jesus goes out of his way to reiterate this. It 
is a life of rest to the soul, of real and abiding 
peace, of deep and lasting joy. It is a life of 



JESUS' POSITIVE TEACHING 1 29 

freedom from care and anxiety; of faith in the 
ultimate triumph of righteousness and love, of 
the cause of Christ and God; of patience and 
courage in the spiritual conflict. 

Its external religious duties are very few and 
simple. Towards God, prayer seems to be the 
only one urged on the disciples. Towards men, 
all duties may be summed up in loving service 
in the spirit of humility, and yet the greatest 
service we can render is often made prominent, 
i. e., preaching, making known and communicat- 
ing to others the unspeakable gift of life which 
we have received in our entrance into the king- 
dom. 

Yet we do not correctly represent Jesus unless 
we remember his insistence on doing God's will. 
The right state of heart is only the necessary 
preliminary to this. The life of the disciples of 
Jesus is to be both active and contemplative, 
but the emphasis is on action. With Jesus, too, 
the will is king. He insists on choosing rather 
than drifting, on doing rather than professing. 
Indeed he anticipates our modern psychology, 
and declares that men will learn God's will by 
doing it, will come to certainty and depth of ex- 



I30 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

perience by walking in the path of loving obedi- 
ence. Jesus never thought of offering a substi- 
tute for real objective righteousness. 

The attitude of the children of the kingdom 
towards life and society needs more than a pass- 
ing word. As we have said, Jesus' primary con- 
cern was with the inner nature of the individual 
man. He sought to make men reverent, pure, 
honest, just and loving by bringing them into a 
new relation to God. His first care was character. 
But just as soon as men were renewed in the 
spirit of their minds, their relation to life and 
men around them was necessarily changed. Their 
life in the family, in business, in the state, would 
be different from what it was before. There 
would be new motives, new ideals, new view- 
points, new energies. Jesus' insistence on active 
love, not merely to brethren within the kingdom, 
but to strangers, Samaritans and even enemies, 
shows his general attitude. He was generally 
content, however, with inculcating a spirit. Only 
rarely did he deal with particular practical prob- 
lems, yet these rare instances prove that he recog- 
nized and expected that the principles he had 
taught would have a direct and decisive influence 



JESUS 7 POSITIVE TEACHING 131 

on social relations. He spoke only once about 
the State (Mark 12: 17). It was a conservative 
word, when the radical word was anticipated by 
his foes, and yet it had in it the seeds of some of 
the finest modern developments in government. He 
spoke repeatedly and emphatically about marriage 
and divorce, upholding the highest ideals with ref- 
erence to them in a lax age. His most frequent and 
most scathing social utterances were, however, re- 
served for the sin of covetousness. So strong are his 
words against riches that he has been claimed by 
modern agitators as their rightful leader in their 
war against property, and has been weakly de- 
fended by some social conservatives as giving us 
a temporary code of morals, fitted only for the 
brief interval which he thought would elapse 
before the end of the world. But Jesus never 
thought of an end of the world in any such sense. 1 
The kingdom of glory which he would bring in 
at his coming would be a kingdom on this earth, 
a new society of men and women, in all essential 
features like the kingdom he was setting up dur- 
ing his earthly career, but purified and relieved 

1 The words " end of the world " should always be translated 
' consummation of the age." 



I32 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

of the incubus of evil. Society would not "end 
in a crash," as some say that he taught, but 
would go on at a higher level. 

Moreover, both social radicals and conserva- 
tives interpret Jesus' words with too bald a 
literalism and without regard to his fundamental 
attitude and purpose. In his care for the spiritual 
development of men, he saw that their only 
salvation was in putting God absolutely first. 
Men could not be bond-servants of both God and 
mammon, for their demands were often opposite, 
and if they tried to worship both, money was 
sure to win them in the end. The opinion which 
puts material things, — food, clothes, money, com- 
forts, — above God, the kingdom, character, so- 
ciety, love, and justice, Jesus set out to reverse. 
He found wealth, and the intense desire for it, 
his greatest foe in this endeavor. It was almost 
impossible to make rich men see what he wanted, 
or to enter into the new life that he opened before 
them. In some desperate instances, he told them 
that their only salvation was in giving it all away 
and starting afresh and free in the new path. 
Yet he did not say this to all, nor make it a 
universal demand. He had rich men and women 



JESUS POSITIVE TEACHING 133 

among his disciples, and always conceded the 
need of bread and clothes and money. Lately 
we have been told that Jesus preached a renun- 
ciation of the world of such a character that to 
follow him would break up society. But this 
also is untrue. He did demand a renunciation 
of self (Mark 8: 34), of the selfish life, of all that 
is sinful and wrong. And this renunciation of 
self and sin is revolutionary in its influence on 
the world. Jesus said it would bring in a new 
age. It has already done so, and will work in- 
creasingly from the present day on. But Jesus 
did not bid men renounce the good in the world. 
He loved nature, he loved his country, he did not 
withdraw his disciples from life but bade them 
fight the good fight in life's swirling currents, he 
recognized the State, he refounded the home, he 
blessed marriage and children, he enjoyed all of 
life's innocent pleasures, he made life richer, 
fuller and nobler. So far as world-renunciation 
and world-affirmation * are concerned, he held 
that even balance of sanity, which did not fear 

1 World-affirmation is a somewhat recent technical word, in- 
vented as an opposite of world-renunciation. It expresses the 
attitude of the man who thinks this' a very good world and is 
not disposed to deny himself any of its pleasures. 



134 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

to bring in the radical change, and yet appre- 
ciated and conserved all that was good in the exist- 
ing order. When he says that his kingdom is 
not of this world, he refers to its heavenly origin 
and its spiritual (non-political) character. He 
never denies, however, that it is his purpose 
to build a new world in the midst of the old one, 
a new world into which the old must come or be 
doomed. 

But what was the relation of Jesus to the King- 
dom of God? * The answer is full and plain and 
makes up a very considerable part of the teach- 
ing of Jesus. To be sure, as we have pointed 
out, he at first and always spoke more of the 
spiritual kingdom, but afterwards frequently of 
the spiritual king. His relation with God was 
intimate and basic. God was his Father, had 
sent him, given him an experience of blessing, 
had filled him with the Spirit and with power, 
had endued him with all the resources of spiritual 
knowledge and energy necessary to his great work 
of salvation, and had guaranteed its ultimate 
success. No less a term than Messiah could 

1 Jesus' teaching on the Method and Progress of the Kingdom 
is more appropriately treated in the next chapter. 



JESUS 7 POSITIVE TEACHING 135 

possibly describe him and that was inadequate. 
So he was the Son of Man, the Son of God, the 
Savior of Men, the King in the Kingdom, and 
the Final Judge. Though his mission, he finally 
saw, could be accomplished only through his 
death, he was certain that he would survive death, 
and in a future and glorious consummation finally 
and perfectly set up the kingdom, and reign in it 
as king. 

Indeed this kingdom was only God's reign in 
the humble and loving heart, with all its blessed 
social consequences. To enter it was but to enter 
into the delightful experience of God, which Jesus 
enjoyed. So the kingdom came with him, and 
could increase and strengthen only as the enjoy- 
ment of his experience was shared by an ever 
increasing multitude. This new life, shared with 
Jesus, found its source of supply in Jesus himself, 
in communion with him, and through him with 
God. The Lord's Supper can mean nothing less 
than that the disciple is to nourish his spiritual 
life by a constant appropriation of the spirit, 
purpose and self-sacrificing love of Jesus. 

Therefore salvation is in Jesus. To love him, 
to follow him, to obey him, to cleave to him, to 



136 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

get his experience and to share his purpose is 
life. He is the way to God. To reject him is to 
choose spiritual death. He is the touchstone of 
destiny. 



CHAPTER VII 

JESUS' WORK AND HIS VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 

Jesus was more than a teacher, he was a 
founder. He must rank with the great empire 
builders; but he was greater than they, for he 
founded a spiritual empire by spiritual means, 
an empire which he still dominates and guides, 
and which still increases, centuries after their 
temporary structures based on force have dropped 
to pieces. This is directly in line with one of 
Jesus' favorite passages, Dan. 7: 13, 14. He 
founded this empire or kingdom, as he called it, 
by giving men a new spiritual life, fostering that 
life, and finally sending them out to build the 
kingdom by communicating their new life to 
others. Despite all that may be said for Peter, 
John and Paul, in a real sense Jesus founded it 
alone. 

Now let us look at this great work of Jesus, 
as presented to us in the gospels and especially 
as viewed by Jesus himself. 
i37 



138 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

First of all, he believed that he was founding 
God's kingdom. God was behind him in this work. 
It was his Father's business, God had sent him. 
The Spirit was upon him, had anointed him, 
and worked in and through him. All the future 
lay in his Father's hands, and he was content 
that it should be so. 

The character of the work is plain. It was 
an aggressive ministry. He sought men. He 
did not wait for men to come to him. He went 
after them. So it was an itinerant ministry. 
Ceaselessly he pursued his preaching tours, from 
village to village, from city to city, from province 
to province. He covered all the major divisions 
of the Jewish fatherland, Judea, Galilee and 
Perea, and preached also in Samaria and Philip's 
tetrarchy. He strove to come into personal con- 
tact with just as many people as possible. 1 The 
white harvest was ever before his eyes and on 
his heart. He prayed for helpers and urged 

x The thoroughness and comprehensiveness of this speaking 
campaign has rarely been equalled. Where did Jesus get this 
aggressiveness? It was peculiarly foreign to the circle of the 
Devout from which he sprang, and in striking contrast to the 
quiet years at Nazareth. Jesus himself ascribes it to the Spirit 
(Luke 4: 18). It clearly testifies to his early certainty and def- 
initeness with reference to his divine call and mission. 



JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 139 

others to pray for them. No difficulties or weari- 
ness held him back. Over the mountains and 
through the wilderness the Shepherd sought his 
sheep. He sent out his still ill-prepared disciples 
by the dozen and the seventy on the same mis- 
sion. From the very first he had intended to 
make them "fishers of men." 

It was a preaching ministry. Preaching was 
Jesus' principal, and, except healing and helping, 
his only method. As the great sower, he sowed 
the divine word or message in men's hearts, the 
message of the kingdom and its new and blessed 
life. He urged men to enter the kingdom, told 
them how to do so, and solemnly warned them of 
the consequences of refusal. He revealed to 
them the father-heart of God, bade them cast 
aside the weary yoke of legalism, and find rest 
in his experience of joy and his new service of 
freedom. 

The ultimate object of this ministry was salva- 
tion, to save men and society from falseness, 
selfishness and irreligion, to truth, righteousness, 
love and God. So Jesus sought sinners, promised 
them on the condition of repentance the divine 
welcome, a Father's forgiveness, and a rein- 



140 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

statement in his favor, constantly alluring them 
by the blessedness of the life of the kingdom 
here and hereafter. On the other hand, he plainly 
warned them that it meant self-renunciation, 
danger, poverty and possibly death. Yet to lose 
life for his sake was to find it. 

It was a ministry of love, of healing and help- 
fulness. Conscious of extraordinary power and 
compassionate by nature, Jesus could not but 
heal the sick and free men from the dreadful 
demon possession. He rejoiced in this power to 
help, he even saw in the casting out of demons 
the evidence of his victory over the powers of 
darkness and evil; but he also recognized the 
danger that by the indiscriminate and continuous 
use of his healing ability, he might give a wrong 
impression of his real object, which was not after all 
the curing of men's bodies but the setting up of a 
spiritual kingdom of spiritually renovated men. So, 
towards the close of his career, we find, in our rec- 
ords at least, ever fewer miracles of physical healing. 

His ministry had a truly universal character. 
Offering a purely spiritual good, the kingdom, on 
purely spiritual conditions, it could not be other- 
wise. Jesus was one of the Jewish common people 



JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 141 

and he loved them. From the very first he had 
not the slightest idea of allying himself with the 
narrow fraternity of separatist Pharisees or gain- 
ing recognition in rabbinic circles. He was 
frankly a common man and remained so. His 
Savior-heart went out to the lost sheep of the 
house of Israel, who, he saw, had no shepherd. 
He came to preach glad news to the poor and 
neglected. He felt himself drawn to the "sin- 
ners," those who had given up trying to keep the 
law and its thousand refinements, and were 
looked upon as unclean by the Pharisees. They 
were not bad people as a whole, but were shut 
out from the religion of the day by the religious 
leaders, and were wandering aimlessly and hope- 
lessly about. Jesus became the shepherd of these 
people, presented to them his glad news that 
legalism was not religion, but that the highest 
spiritual good could be had by the sincere and 
childlike, who would begin a life of inner honesty 
and love to God and man. And they received 
his message. Into this circle he drew the publi- 
cans, the small practical politicians of the day, 
who had turned their back on Pharisaic exclusive- 
ness and Zealot dreams as unremunerative, and 



142 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

were in life for what they could make out of it. 
Many of them received him gladly and one of 
them became an apostle. 

Nor did Jesus confine himself to these. Con- 
trary to the law, he laid a sympathetic hand on 
a poor leper. He invited the harlots to come into 
the kingdom and they came. He offered a 
Samaritan woman the water of life and had an 
open heart towards all her hated race. He healed 
the servant of the Gentile Roman centurion, 
started to enter his house without a thought of 
defilement (cf. Acts 10: 28, 11: 3), and praised 
his faith as greater than any he had yet found 
in Israel. But Jesus was no class Savior. He 
sought to bring even the Pharisees into the joy 
of the kingdom. He pleaded with the Jewish 
senator, Nicodemus; he was at home with the 
well-to-do family at Bethany. Of the rich young 
ruler alone, it is said in the Synoptists that "he 
loved him." 1 He neither courted nor shunned 
any particular set of men. He sought nothing 
less than the salvation of the nation as such. 

x Mark 10: 21 (no parallels). John 11: 5 tells us that Jesus 
loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, also prosperous people; 
the Fourth Gospel too sometimes speaks of " the disciple whom 
Jesus loved." 



JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 143 

This conclusion with reference to the univer- 
sality of Jesus is seemingly opposed by two pas- 
sages, Matthew 10: 5 (no parallel) and Matthew 
15: 24-26 (Mark 7: 37). The former, however, 
which bids the Twelve avoid Gentile or Samaritan 
territory on their preaching tour is fully explained 
by the inadvisability of sending men still full of 
Jewish prejudice to preach to outsiders. The 
latter passage, in which Jesus says to the Syro- 
phcenician that he is sent to the lost sheep of 
the house of Israel, is more difficult. It probably 
records Jesus' feeling about the limitations of 
his own mission, which at that period especially 
he could not transgress without serious harm to 
his ultimate purposes. A Gentile mission at this 
crisis in his career would not only have rendered 
a final appeal to the nation impossible, but 
would probably have strained the disciples' faith 
to the breaking point. But here too, it must be 
noted, the wise love of Jesus found a way. The 
woman's faith, Jesus intimated, showed that 
she belonged to the spiritual Israel. 

As we have seen, the ministry was not much 
more than half over, before he became convinced 
that his violent death was inevitable. He was 



144 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

sure that God had sent him, and he could not 
stop. Yet his continuance in the work constantly 
aggravated the bitter and murderous opposition of 
his enemies. There could be only one result, but, 
if so, death was a part of his mission, a part of the 
Father's plan for him, and, consequently, it must 
be necessary to the accomplishment of his great 
purpose of salvation. So he was certain at last 
that he could not save the world by preaching 
only. He must add to preaching the laying down 
of his life. He could save the world only by dying 
for it. 1 But just how his death was to save the 
world Jesus never said. 

Only two passages can possibly aid us at this 
point. In Mark 10: 45 and parallel, Jesus speaks 
of giving his life a ransom for many, as the loftiest 
example of loving service. He tells us that his 
self-sacrificing death was a part of his mission, 
and that through it God would save "many," 
but the how and why remains a mystery. Mark 
14: 24 and parallels at first look more hopeful. 
Jesus is speaking of the wine at the Last Supper, 



1 When this thought began to dawn on Jesus, he found Old 
Testament passages which confirmed it to his mind, especially 
Isaiah 53. 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 145 

as the symbol of his shed blood. "This is the 
blood of the covenant, which is poured out for 
many," and Matthew rightly adds, "for the 
remission or forgiveness of sins." Jesus by these 
words clearly indicates that he regarded his 
death as a sacrifice. All sacrifices are more or 
less related to the forgiveness of sins, which is 
one of God's initial steps in the salvation of the 
sinner. Still, after all, the whole meaning may be 
nothing more than that through the offering of 
his life as a sacrifice, salvation will come to the 
world, and we make no progress in trying to 
answer the how and why. 

The only real items of information which we 
get from this passage are the facts that Jesus 
looked upon his death as a covenant sacrifice, 
which actually founded the new community, the 
new Israel; and that in this symbolism he ex- 
pressed the power of blessing which he expected 
from his death. Just as they drank the wine of 
the cup, assimilated and made it a part of them- 
selves, so his disciples must partake of and ap- 
propriate his spirit which does not refuse the 
supreme sacrifice for others' good. Only thus 
can they nourish their own spiritual lives or 



146 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

have a part in the new kingdom of self-giving 
love. They too must add sacrifice to preaching. 
This is profoundly significant. It founds Chris- 
tianity not on a teaching, but on a person and an 
act. 1 That person and act must live again in 
Jesus' followers. Possibly we begin to see an 
answer to the how and why, but not as clearly 
as we would like. Possibly Jesus could not pro- 
duce in this world by any other means except 
his self-sacrificing death that new type of charac- 
ter which would be dead to all the claims of self- 
interest and self-gratification and would gladly de- 
vote and lay down life itself for other's good. And 
such a life of self-sacrifice in lowly service to man 
and loving obedience to God and duty is salvation. 
Gethsemane and the cry on the cross, "Why 
hast thou forsaken me?" still call for explana- 
tion. Up to the time of the midnight hour in 
the garden, Jesus had proved himself to be the 
bravest of the brave, always decisive, always 
master of the situation. Why then this agony of 

1 We may here aptly repeat the old story of the young man 
who came to Rousseau, no friend of Christianity, complaining 
that after ten years of labor he had not gained a single convert 
to the new religion he had invented. "If you will be crucified 
and rise again the third day, you will have no difficulty," answered 
the old philosopher. A deeply significant reply. 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 147 

soul in prospect of the nearer approach of a 
death which he had long anticipated and had 
come to Jerusalem to meet? Was this an hour 
of weakness, of faltering before a reality, of 
which he had spoken bravely enough when it 
was at a distance? No, we cannot believe that 
Jesus faltered where many of his followers have 
sung hymns of triumphant faith. The cry on 
the cross explains Gethsemane. In the garden, 
he found in the cup which he was about to drain 
something more dreadful to him than physical 
anguish and death. That something was the 
clouding of the perfect communion with his 
Father, which he had enjoyed from his earliest 
recollection, which was more than life to him. 
He had never anticipated this before that final 
night. It was something absolutely new and 
strange to him, and he shrank back from it till 
he learned that it was the Father's will, the only 
way of accomplishing his mission and securing 
the salvation of men. The why he never learned, 
and still asked, "Why?" upon the cross, where 
at last in those hours of darkness he suffered the 
dread reality of which Gethsemane was but the 
warning shadow. And men ever since have 



148 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

asked, "Why? Why was it necessary? " Possibly 
that our leader might go to the very limits of 
self-sacrifice and submission to the Father's will, 
that he might taste a bitterness in death of which 
none of his followers can possibly find the equal. 
He will not ask us to tread where he has not 
preceded and outdone us. 

And this may not be all. For a time at least 
Jesus was in the sinner's place in that there was 
a cloud between him and the Father. We can- 
not believe that the Father was, as a matter of 
fact, angry with his Son, now suffering in obedi- 
ence to him. But the Father did allow the cloud 
to come between, and to Jesus it was all real. 
Was the cause merely physical, some profound 
nervous depression? Even so, it was the bitter- 
ness of death to him, and God allowed it to be, 
as part of his plan. And just what was the 
cloud? Was it the cloud of sin? If that is true, 
it could not have been his sin, for he had none, 
but ours. And so we are back at the fifty-third 
of Isaiah again. It is to be noted that this chap- 
ter was very much in the mind of the earliest 
church, and very likely of Jesus himself in this 
very connection. 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 149 

But whatever we may think or say about it, 
the cross has been the greatest element of power 
in the gospel. In all the long history it has 
awed, allured, melted and conquered men's 
hearts. Paul is not wrong when in Romans 8 : 3 
he declares that by the death of Jesus, God 
had done a hitherto impossible thing, he had 
by one act forever condemned and broken the 
power of sin and selfishness. By this act, Jesus 
bound the strong man, and from that day, pro- 
ceeds to spoil him of his goods. The powers of 
evil can never recover from that deadly blow, 
but are bound to fall at last as the result of it. 
In the blaze of the light from Golgotha, all the 
beasts of darkness will finally creep into their 
holes, never to emerge again. The cross will yet 
make Jesus the Lord of the world; by its power 
he will draw all men unto himself. 

Jesus' view of the future of his work is not 
altogether clear and the subject raises many 
difficult questions much debated by scholars. 
The first of these questions is whether Jesus in- 
tended to found a church, and whether he fore- 
saw even the separation of his disciples from 
Judaism. It is asserted by the more radical 



150 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

critics that Jesus moved wholly in the narrow 
circle of Jewish ideas and customs, that he con- 
sidered his mission limited to the Jewish people, 
that he was altogether an opportunist in his 
method, deciding nothing until the occasion arose 
but leaving all the future in his Father's hands, 
that the early disciples after the resurrection still 
considered themselves Jews and attended the wor- 
ship of the temple, indeed that Christianity needed 
a Paul to shake it free from its Jewish exclusive- 
ness. It is furthermore pointed out that the two 
passages in which the church is mentioned, Mat- 
thew 16: 18 and 18: 17, are peculiar to Matthew 
and are probably not the words of Jesus. 

We cannot accept these views as a whole. 
The evidence gives us another picture. Phari- 
saism was practically Judaism. It had a pre- 
dominant influence in the Sanhedrin, and con- 
trolled the whole synagogue and school system 
of Palestine. It permeated the whole thought of 
the people, and neither Jesus nor Christianity 
could finally unfasten its hold on the nation. 
The break with the Pharisees began with John 
the Baptist. He rejected them and they rejected 
him. His baptism practically created a new kind 



JESUS ' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 151 

of Jew, known as the disciples of John. Finding 
no welcome in Pharisaism, they clung together 
and long survived the death of their leader with- 
out being re-absorbed into Judaism. John thought 
those who received his baptism of repentance the 
true Israel and looked on the Pharisees as doomed 
to destruction. Jesus took the same view of the 
Pharisees. While he seems to have had some 
hopes of the Galilean and perhaps of the Perean 
Pharisees at first, his break with Pharisees as 
such was final and complete. They had and 
wished no part in his new spiritual kingdom, and 
Jesus prophesied their rejection by God and their 
irremediable ruin. On the other hand, he was 
gathering about him a band of disciples, among 
them many publicans and "sinners" whom the 
Pharisees counted unclean. Jesus, however, 
thought these disciples the heirs of the kingdom 
of God. He had originally called them in order 
that, after suitable instruction, they might help 
him in his work of preaching, might become 
"fishers of men," that is, missionaries or apostles, 
but, when he chose the Twelve, he probably 
already began to foresee that the nation as such 
would never be won from Judaism to enter the 



152 THE MAN OE NAZARETH 

new society. This choice of the Twelve gave his 
little band a sort of loose organization, and he 
made the education of these leaders one of the 
principal parts of his work. He had no idea 
of a reunion of his disciples with contemporary 
Judaism. Rather he predicted that the Jews 
would persecute his disciples to the death, and 
in the Lord's Supper, he bound them in a new 
covenant to himself and to each other, and thus 
formally founded the new Society. 

Although Jesus was no revolutionary and 
frankly based his teaching on the Old Testament, 
he looked upon his mission and teaching as some- 
thing new, and the Pharisees clearly recognized 
it as such. In his parables of the new patch on 
the old garment and the new wine in the old 
wine skins, Jesus declared that his new teaching 
could never be related to the old so as to become 
a part of it. Indeed Judaism would be destroyed, 
while he was setting up an everlasting king- 
dom. 

How, then, can it be said that Jesus did not 
foresee the separation of his disciples from Ju- 
daism? And if he did get a vision of that, he 
must also have foreseen their future community 



JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 53 

life. They had gained his view and his spirit, and 
must share his isolation and rejection. So long 
as they held to Jesus as Messiah, the Pharisees 
would bar them out and bitterly persecute them. 
It consequently seems as if Jesus must have said 
some such words as those recorded in Matthew 
16: 18, "On this rock I will build my church." 
They not only fit the historical situation, but it 
practically demands them. By "church" Jesus 
here meant "sacred congregation," using the 
Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew Old Testa- 
ment word for the congregation of Israel. He 
felt that his followers were the true Israel, the 
heirs of the coming Kingdom. On Peter, the 
first confessor of his spiritual Messiahship, he 
will build of like living stones, his congregation, 
his church. 

The church then began historically with the 
followers of John the Baptist, but developed 
under Jesus' teaching and leadership in Galilee 
and Perea, having few, if any, roots in Jerusalem 
and Judea. Yet while it was thus brought into 
being by John and Jesus, it was a formless thing, 
organizing itself around the Lord in the way of 
personal devotion, and recognizing after a fashion 



154 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the moral authority of the twelve men whom 
Jesus had made leaders. 

Harnack and Pfleiderer cannot believe that 
Jesus had any such historical horizon as to enable 
him to foresee a Gentile mission, and by criti- 
cal or exegetical methods they eliminate all pas- 
sages which appear to ascribe such foresight to 
him. 

We must here, too, start from the known 
towards the problematical. Nothing is more cer- 
tain about Jesus than his breadth of mind, his 
depth of insight, and his sympathy with the de- 
spised and the outcast. He had an inward antago- 
nism to all Pharisaic exclusiveness and contempt 
for others. This is a strong preliminary reason 
for believing that Jesus was interested in Gentiles, 
who were common enough in all parts of Pales- 
tine. Three great a priori arguments arise too 
from Jesus' historical situation. 1 First, the Old 
Testament is full of predictions of the conversion 
of the Gentiles. This is especially true of Isaiah, 
one of Jesus' favorite books, and the same thought 
is found in Daniel 2: 35, 44; 7: 14. The last is 

1 Care must be taken not to confuse the subject of the Gentile 
mission with the narrower question of the Judaistic controversy. 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 55 

the Son of Man prophecy, which we felt justified 
in calling Jesus' guiding star (p. 86). x Second, 
those who believed in the coming of a political 
Messiah believed that he would conquer and 
finally reign over all nations. Indeed, the third 
temptation is based on this very thought. Would 
a spiritual Messiah expect to do less? Third, 
the Pharisees of Jesus' time carried on an active 
propaganda among the Gentiles, and had many 
converts. Jesus himself refers to their compass- 
ing sea and land to make one proselyte (Mat- 
thew 23: 15). Would Jesus have his "fishers of 
men" less zealous? 

Add to these familiar elements of the thought- 
world of Jesus the fact that he himself spent 
some weeks or months in heathen Phoenicia and 
Syria after the crisis at Capernaum. Can we 
believe that he went through that experience 
without having his heart moved with compassion 
for the Gentiles, although it may not have been 
wise for him to give expression to it then? Note 

1 It seems clear that Jesus identified himself with Isaiah's 
Servant of Jehovah, who is represented as God's Messenger of 
Salvation to the ends of the earth (Isa. 49: 5, 6, and other 
passages). This is another strong proof of his consciousness of 
a world-wide mission. 



156 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

especially that before he took this journey, he had 
been eager to help the Gentile centurion, who 
had asked him to heal his servant, and had been 
loud in his praise of the heathen's faith, nay, 
without hesitation was proceeding to enter his 
house, something which even Peter was loath 
to do years afterwards (Acts 10: 28, 11: 3), and 
was only stopped by the centurion's considerate 
message. The centurion knew the Jewish prej- 
udice and would not permit Jesus to expose 
himself to ceremonial defilement. Note also that 
the Syrophoenician asked for help just at the 
beginning of this foreign tour. Many things 
combined to make her request seem untimely, 
but, as we have seen, Jesus reconciled his Jewish 
mission with his aid to the Gentile on the prin- 
ciple that faith rather than nationality admitted 
to membership in his new Israel. This incident 
in all its significance would go with him during 
his entire journey. Nor should it be overlooked 
that the visit of Gentiles from this very territory 
described in the twelfth of John is exactly in 
line with the foregoing. 
The spiritual character of the kingdom which 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 57 

Jesus preached and its spiritual conditions of 
entrance plainly implied the universality of its 
membership. And this is strengthened when we 
remember that Jesus absolutely repudiated the 
nationalistic ideal of Messiahship and the king- 
dom. This spiritual character of the kingdom 
made it the property of the poor in spirit and 
the pure in heart, freed men from all class dis- 
tinctions and race prejudice, and brought them 
into a new world of love and brotherhood. Can 
we think that he who first gave the world this 
wonderful charter of spiritual liberty really did 
not understand its true significance or its simplest 
implications; that Jesus, the originator of the 
idea, comprehended it less clearly than Paul, 
its expounder? Furthermore, the universality of 
Messiah's reign is a necessary logical corollary of 
monotheism. If there is one God, he must be 
God of both Jews and Gentiles, and interested in 
the salvation of all. This is Paul's argument 
in Romans 3: 29-31. Could not Jesus also draw 
so plain an inference? There can be but one 
answer, and that answer is further confirmed by 
Jesus' acknowledged attitude towards Samari- 



158 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

tans, whom the Jews hated certainly as cordially 
as they did Gentiles. 1 

These considerations make the reference of 
Jesus to the Gentile mission perfectly natural, 
though it is probable that the thought came into 
greater prominence after his foreign tour. This 
favorable feeling towards Gentiles gives point 
to his first speech at Nazareth (Luke 4: 24-29). 
The universalism of the salt of the earth and the 
light of the world (Matthew 5: 13, 14) is unmis- 
takable. The reference to many coming from 
the east and the west and sitting down with 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of 
Heaven while the sons of the kingdom shall be 
cast out, in its immediate connection with the 
Gentile centurion's faith and in a passage criti- 
cally unassailable, is decisive for Jesus' inclusion 
of Gentiles in the kingdom (Matthew 8: 11, 12; 
Luke 13: 28, 29). Being brought before govern- 
ors and kings, therefore, naturally implies the mis- 

1 While Jesus never discussed the question of circumcision or 
pronounced on the issue raised in the Judaistic controversy, the 
evidence adduced above leaves us in no doubt as to whether 
Jesus would have sided with Paul or the Judaizers, had the ques- 
tion arisen in his day. Here Jesus, Stephen and Paul stand to- 
gether. 



JESUS WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 1 59 

sion to the heathen (Mark 13: 9; Matthew 10: 18). 
In these circumstances, we doubtless have a gen- 
uine saying of Jesus in the prophecy that the 
anointing by Mary should be heralded, wherever 
the gospel is preached in the whole world. And 
the entire discussion greatly strengthens the uni- 
versal Great Commission of the risen Savior. We 
cannot doubt that "the world was in his heart." 1 
Jesus then believed that his disciples would 
separate from Judaism, would form a new com- 
munity, the true Israel, 2 that this gospel would 
be preached among the Gentiles and received by 
them, and that all peoples, nations and languages 
would serve him (Dan. 7: 14, the "Son of Man" 
passage). Jesus therefore was the Founder of the 
Kingdom of God. We do not mean that God had 
not reigned truly but imperfectly in the hearts of 
Abraham, Moses, Samuel and Isaiah before this 
time, but we do say that Jesus definitely set 
before himself, as they did not, the idea of a 

1 Mk. 13: 10; Mt. 21: 43, and the numerous universalistic pas- 
sages in John are omitted from the discussion, because they would 
carry little weight with those who take the opposite side, and 
some of them are possibly open to legitimate critical and exe- 
getical objections. 

2 Indeed these changes had already occurred in principle and 
had been partially worked out historically. 



l6o THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

concrete spiritual kingdom, which would take prac- 
tical form as a body of men bound together only 
by spiritual ties, calling themselves brethren be- 
cause all felt in themselves the working of the same 
new life; a definite body of people in the world 
but not of the world, having the one definite pur- 
pose of bringing the whole world to enjoy their 
blessing of spiritual life. This mission, which was 
his mission, he left at his death in the hands of a 
few ordinary men of a despised race, and with only 
an imperfect understanding of their task. But he 
trusted their faith and love and God's ability to 
use them in this high enterprise. This little band, 
which he still inspires with his life and energy, has 
become the dominant force in our civilization, and 
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 

Jesus takes pains to describe the processes of 
the kingdom's growth. The influence of his 
disciples will be all pervading; like salt, saving 
the world from its corruptions, like light, bring- 
ing to all men the knowledge of the Father. The 
growth is from small to large, from beginning to 
consummation and ever from within outward. 
Jesus likens it to the mighty, silent, self-acting 
forces of nature. The parables in which these 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE l6l 

truths are expressed sound almost like those of a 
modern evolutionist. Yet Jesus emphasizes the 
divine agency more than the human cooperation. 
The kingdom is God's, it is from heaven; the 
initial impulse, the fundamental energy, the power 
for consummation, are divine. Nor will the de- 
velopment be always even and peaceful. The 
kingdom is bound to enter upon a fierce life-and- 
death struggle with its environment, a conflict 
which will end in victory only after the most 
dreadful persecutions and martyrdoms. Jesus 
came to send not peace, but a sword. 

As to the outcome, Jesus had not the slightest 
doubt. It will be a complete and final victory. 
But whether that victory is to be won before 
his second Coming is not made clear. On this 
point the evidence is conflicting and confused. 
The one passage which hints a pessimistic view, 
that the Son of Man at his Coming will fail to 
find faith on the earth (Luke 18: 8), is in all 
probability a very early interpolation from the 
margin of the manuscript. The Leaven, more 
or less supported by some other growth parables, 
seems to know nothing of the second Coming and 
to rely merely on the spiritual vitality of the 



1 62 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

kingdom to carry it on to success by the use 
of preaching in its largest sense. On the other 
hand, the parable of the Sower teaches only par- 
tial success, and the Tares tells us plainly that 
wheat and tares shall grow together until the 
harvest. Yet these too are evolutionary parables 
of growth. The parables of the return of the house- 
holder, the king and the bridegroom likewise assert 
that they will find good and bad at their home- 
coming. Indeed, this is the predominant repre- 
sentation. It seems possible that the parables of 
the former type belong to the period when Jesus 
expected to succeed in his campaign of preaching, 
the latter sort to the time after he became sure of 
his death and as a result began to preach his 
second Coming to his disciples. The difference is 
not so great as it first seems, however. In both 
representations final victory is assured and, as it 
seems to me, by spiritual means (cf. p. 9of.). 

However great the difficulties involved, the 
evidence seems to prove that Jesus looked for- 
ward to his resurrection as well as to his second 
Coming. And we cannot help asking, How did 
Jesus come to think that he would rise again? 
Of course, all good Jews of his time believed in 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OF ITS FUTURE 163 

the resurrection at the last day, but Jesus antici- 
pated for himself something entirely different, in 
fact, unique. This assurance was possibly the 
complex result of several lines of faith and feeling. 
Jesus' extraordinary career was based on his ex- 
perience of perfect moral union and communion 
with his Father and his consequent call to bring 
men into that same experience. As he looked 
forward to a fast approaching death, and felt 
it to be a divinely appointed part of his mission 
of salvation, long since foretold in the Old Testa- 
ment, he felt that death could not be the end 
either of him or his work. His cross might be 
necessary to the triumph of the kingdom, but 
could not be its consummation. That glorious 
kingdom of the future must lie beyond his death. 
Further, he had first realized the kingdom in 
his own heart and life. The kingdom came with 
him. He had been its founder among men, had 
been the center of its life, power and righteous- 
ness. He was the Messiah-king. He could not 
conceive of the further development of the king- 
dom without him. He was necessary to it. God 
had called him for this purpose and there was 
no other to complete the task. So he felt that 



164 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

death after all could not for any extended time 
sever his personal relation to the kingdom. Nor 
did he believe that his Father, of whose love he 
had never had the shadow of a doubt, would 
leave him the prey of death (Mark 12: 261., cf. 
Acts 2: 24-28) or that he would allow the ene- 
mies of his kingdom the lasting triumph of the 
cross. These subjective feelings were justified 
by the history. All now agree that without the 
disciples' belief in the resurrection, all Jesus' work 
would have come to naught. 

But, most important of all, Jesus felt within 
himself an indestructible life, a vital energy far 
above that of other men, a power which had 
brought health to ten thousand sick, which was 
more than a match for leprosy itself, which had 
even revivified the dead. He had indeed been a 
victor in his conflict with Satan, had bound the 
strong man and spoiled his goods by casting out 
innumerable demons, had defied and overcome 
all the powers of evil and darkness. He felt that, 
though he might die, death was not congruous 
with his nature and that he would snap its bond. 

He therefore thought of himself as always con- 
tinuing with his disciples (Matthew 18: 20; 28: 20) 



JESUS' WORK AND VIEW OP ITS FUTURE 165 

to answer their petitions, to be their helper and 
leader in all their work of building the kingdom. 
To be sure, he would be present no longer visibly, 
but by his Spirit, who would dwell in their hearts, 
take his place, and do for them all that he had 
done during his earthly ministry, and more 
(John 14-16). So Paul calls the glorified Lord 
"the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3: 18). 

And he would come again. We have shown 
(p. 9if.) that this is probably also a purely spiri- 
tual coming, but so personal that all would recog- 
nize his presence, and so dynamic as finally to 
extirpate all the forces of incorrigible evil, and 
lift the whole world up into a new age of spiritual 
power, that glorious final perfect stage of the 
kingdom, which the Father has planned. In 
other words, Jesus was certain of personal triumph 
in his mighty enterprise and a final triumph in 
spite of death, nay, through death, a triumph 
which God had pledged him in his very call, and 
which was as certain to come as God was to con- 
tinue righteous and supreme. Representing all 
that was purest and holiest in the universe, Jesus 
was sure that "he must reign until he had put all 
his enemies under his feet" (1 Cor. 15: 25). 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 

What Jesus was, was the root of all that he 
said and did. All he taught originated in his 
inner experience, and his life was the undistorted 
reflex of his heart. This is what gives him that 
indefinable charm of simplicity, naturalness and 
reality, familiar to all readers of the gospels. 
Clear waters flow from a pure spring. 

The two foci of Jesus' inner experience were 
his Father and his mission of salvation for men 
(Luke 2: 49), but of these his Father was first. 
The deepest secret of Jesus is his relation to his 
Father. He could not remember the beginning 
of that divine fellowship, close, delightful, un- 
broken, reverent. He lived in the sunshine of 
his Father's smile. He was conscious of such a 
real unity of love, thought and purpose with 
God, that he could call him nothing less than 
Father, and himself nothing else than Son. His 
greatest happiness was in communion with the 
166 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 67 

Father. Prayer was his vital breath, the basic 
activity of his soul. His life was consequently a 
life of childlike trust in his Father's love and wis- 
dom. Even when his skies darkened, and apparent 
failure and death loomed large upon his horizon, 
he still trusted. He knew that the Father's will 
was best, and left all the future in the Father's 
hands. Even in that last strange cry upon the 
cross, God is still "my God." Jesus cannot, will 
not and does not lose his hold on God. 

In one of the few passages in which Jesus refers 
to his own inner experience, he tells us that his 
life had a joy deeper than all perplexity and 
sorrow, and a peace which the world could neither 
give nor take away. And this joy and peace 
sprang from his sense of his Father's love. That 
love was his life. He consciously lived and moved 
and had his being in God. Never the shadow of 
a doubt flitted across his mind. God was the 
bottom of his certainty, the beginning, middle 
and end of all things to him. He was incapable 
of a single thought or act, he heard or saw noth- 
ing which he did not instinctively relate to God. 
"He was as full of religion as a rose is of fragrance 
or a nightingale of song." What wonder then 



1 68 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

that when he began his work, he knew nothing 
except heart-religion and proved the relentless 
foe of externalism and imposed authority, and 
that he founded his whole conception of salvation 
on the possibility of such a unique relation be- 
tween God and man as had never been broached 
before. 

Out of this blessed fellowship with the Father 
and his sense of the spiritual need of men, came 
Jesus' idea of his mission. He wanted all men to 
share the Father's love with him, and knew that 
all their sorrow, sin and fear would vanish as 
soon as they came into possession of what he had 
always enjoyed. And he felt that he must and 
could bring them into that blessed state. His 
deep love and regard for men permitted nothing 
less. This was his mission in the world. This 
was the work which God had given him to do, a 
work of salvation which included in it all lesser 
good. So he called himself Messiah, and Messiah- 
ship meant to him just this and nothing else. 
In Jesus' mind Messiah meant Savior, the One 
whom God had anointed to bring salvation to 
men. 

Certainty. Jesus was sure of God and of his 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 169 

mission, and his certainty was and is one of the 
elements of his power. He knew God as well as 
he knew his mother. In fact, he says that no 
one ever knew God so well as he (Matthew n: 
27). His mission came with a "must." It was 
an inner necessity. He could not and would not 
hold back. Like all great men, and yet more 
surely than any other great man, he was positive 
that he had been sent into the world to do a 
definite thing and the nature of that definite 
thing was perfectly clear to his mind. His as- 
surance of life beyond death and of the consum- 
mation of his work in his final Coming showed 
that his certainty stood tests such as no other 
man's faith in his mission has ever surmounted. 
Courage. So he undertook his God-given work 
without hesitation or misgiving, in the naked 
strength of a mighty and noble purpose in which 
he rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of 
glory. He was filled with a high enthusiasm, 
which was tempered indeed by the events of the 
ministry, but ran more strongly when it ran 
deep. He was never discouraged, fretted or 
soured by opposition and seeming failure. He 
was aggressive from the very start and pressed 



I70 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the work. No more tireless preacher ever lived. 
When enemies arose, he was not content merely 
to defend, but stormed their works and carried 
the war into Africa. There was about him a 
holy boldness which utterly disconcerted his 
foes, and eventually made timid fishermen into 
Sons of Thunder (Acts 4: 13). So sure of himself 
was he, that he sometimes seemed to risk all on 
a single hazard, and almost recklessly to defy 
his opponents to put him to the test (Mark 2: 
9-12). He was the bravest of the brave. Almost 
single handed, he faced a nation, an age, a world, 
which was bound to misunderstand, oppose and 
hate him, and yet always with the same lofty 
courage. No forlorn hope was ever led more 
resolutely than the last march of Jesus' little 
band from Galilee to Jerusalem. The serene 
calm of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, 
and on the way to the cross, will never cease to 
compel the world's admiration. 

Jesus' simple confidence in his final triumph was 
superb. In spite of all outward defeats, he had 
in his soul a continuous victory of faith. Ob- 
stacles like the cross, unforeseen at the beginning, 
could not dim that supreme assurance, for it was 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 171 

based on his Father's love for him and for men, 
and in an optimism with regard to our race, 
which had never before been cherished in a human 
heart. So, strange to say, he was not in the least 
nervous or anxious about the outcome. He 
never swerved a hair from the straight path of 
his purpose to gain a single convert, or to keep 
a multitude from deserting him. He was so 
certain of triumph that he could wait for it and 
bide the time when he could have it on his own 
terms. This is the finest patience, and patience 
is courage long drawn out, the last test of the 
bravest hearts. 

Joy. Jesus was not only sure, enthusiastic, 
hopeful and brave, but he was positively joyous. 
It was the joy of certainty, love and strength; 
a Son's joy deeply based in his Father's affection, 
a Savior's joy in the rescue of the lost, a strong 
man's joy in a great and worthy task, in battling 
with the storm. So he partook with zest of life's 
pure pleasures; he enjoyed nature, children, 
friends, the busy world in all its phases. His 
spirit was fresh and exultant. The early days 
of the ministry seemed to him like a wedding 
party with himself as the bridegroom. Whatever 



172 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

others might think of fasting, it was alien to his 
mood. Life to him was a continual feast and he 
so represented it. He wanted this happy spirit 
to be contagious (John 15: 11). He pleaded with 
men to enter into the joy (Luke 15: 28-32). 
"On the two occasions 1 when Jesus took special 
pains to justify his conduct to his enemies, he 
was really explaining why he and his disciples 
were so joyful." To be sure, as the ministry 
went on to its tragic issue, the tone of Jesus grew 
more solemn. He was indeed "a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief," but there is no con- 
tradiction here. Joy and sorrow are not enemies 
but twin brothers. Indeed in the midst of trou- 
ble and sadness, Jesus' joy only grew in depth 
and ripened into triumph as he became assured 
that he would gain more by his death than he 
ever had by his life. He came to rejoice in his 
great sacrifice as his supreme victory. On the 
last night, he could say, "I have overcome the 
world," and could leave as a legacy to his dis- 
ciples not only his peace, but his joy. 

Love. The call to the work of saving men to 
God and to goodness found a ready response in 
1 Mark 2:18-20; Luke 15: 1-32. 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 73 

Jesus' tender heart. Love made him Savior. Com- 
passion for men in darkness, perplexity, sorrow and 
sin constrained him to show them how to enter into 
light and certainty, joy and holiness. Thus love to 
men goes back to the beginning of his experience 
so rich in love to God, and proves itself one of the 
major constituent elements in his character. 

His love was perfectly natural and simple. 
He loved men as men. He never asked why he 
should love men. He just loved them. They 
seemed to him to need love and he gave it with- 
out stint. Man seemed to him most lovable, 
more valuable than all else beside, a single soul 
worth more than a whole world. Before the 
shrine of every human heart he stood with rever- 
ence. He would not force open the door, nor 
do violence to the will, nor intrude upon the 
secrets of the unwilling soul. His respect for 
personality was perfect. That men were stupid, 
foolish, sinful and foul only made him the more 
eager. He was the physician for sick souls. He 
had no doubts that men could rise from weakness 
and sin into spiritual health and wholeness. He 
was strangely optimistic about the least hopeful 
cases. It was the faith of love. 



174 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Just because he held men so high, he sought 
their good the more earnestly and persistently. 
And it was no sentimental love that he showed 
and taught, but a love of deed, a true kindliness, 
thoughtfulness, a loving service which shrank 
from no sacrifice, a real doing of good. Nor did 
his love know any limits of class or sex or nation 
or creed. He had no race or social prejudices. 
He loved men for themselves, rich and poor, 
men, women and children, Pharisees, Gentiles 
and publicans, lepers and Sanhedrists, Samari- 
tans, scribes and sinners, respectable and outcast, 
good and bad, friends and enemies. He loved 
them all and there was nothing which he would 
not do for their true good. And he who led this 
life of practical love also preached love as the 
sum of the whole Old Testament and of his new 
religion too, and along with love, as variation 
or by-product of it, he preached and exemplified 
gentleness, patience, mercy, charity, forgiveness, 
generosity and peace, giving these passive vir- 
tues for the first time a standing as indispensable 
to character. So he lived and preached and died 
to bring the reign of love into this old world of 
selfishness and greed and hate. 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 75 

That this was no assumed and, as it were, pro- 
fessional love is proved by his entire character 
and career. Rather it was instinctive. He had 
a sensitive nature. He was no cold, detached, 
impassive philosopher or ascetic, a mere onlooker, 
while men strove and struggled. Rather he 
plunged into the struggle himself. His emotions 
were strong and warm. His heart was tender. 
He loved his friends. Bold and firm as he was, 
he suffered under opposition and hatred, though 
he did not allow them to narrow or spoil his life. 
He knew trouble and sorrow, and his sensitive 
spirit sometimes cried out in its pain. 

He had a strong social nature. He loved the 
crowded streets, the feast, the wedding, the 
eager multitude and all the ways of men. To 
be sure, he often preferred to be alone on the 
distant mountain to spend the night with his 
Father in prayer, but, next day, refreshed, he was 
engaged again among the busy throng. Sym- 
pathetic by nature, he felt the need of company 
and the strength supplied by the presence of 
loving friends. No one more deeply appreciated 
the affection lavished upon him, but, on the other 
hand, he was free from the weakness of self-pity, 



176 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

he knew how to stand alone. He loved nature 
and children too, as few in his day did, and as 
he has taught the world to do. This inborn love 
gave this Galilean peasant an exquisite refine- 
ment and courtesy. He was the first and fore- 
most Christian gentleman of all time, and though 
he loved all, he was filled with the rarest chivalry 
for those who had no helper, for women, for the 
poor, the outcast and the fallen. The friendless, 
at last, had a great and tender friend. 

This Jesus was incarnate love. He was abso- 
lutely unselfish. He had no ambitions to satisfy, 
he never gave a thought to riches, he sought no 
pleasures outside the one great work to which 
he had devoted himself with entire single-hearted- 
ness, the highest good, the salvation of men. 
He wanted nothing for himself. All he desired 
was to give, to help, to sympathize, to heal, for- 
getting all his own comfort, consuming himself 
in labor for others, and finally dying that they 
might live. He felt that he had so much of spiri- 
tual blessing that he could be lavish in its be- 
stowal. He was the first great lover of men, and 
none of his followers has yet equalled him 
here. 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 177 

And just at this point is solved the most serious 
seeming contradiction in his character. Jesus 
was great, and he was conscious of his power, as 
all truly great men are. He was Messiah, Lord 
and King, and this he asserted in no uncertain 
words. Yet he did not grasp at authority (Phil. 
2: 6-8), rather he praised humility, and said 
that he was meek and lowly in heart. How can 
these two things coexist in one spirit? His love 
solves it all. He did not look on his Messiahship 
as a self -won dignity of which to be proud, but 
as a divinely given commission to be performed, 
a service of love to be rendered. To him, as we 
have said, Messiah meant Savior. There was 
no work so important or so lowly that he did 
not rejoice to do it. He washed the disciples' 
feet the night before he died upon the cross, and 
for him there was no distinction in kind between 
the two acts. So his greatness was in his power 
to serve. He ranks first in self-sacrifice. He 
was Lord because he was conscious of absolutely 
unequalled resources for effective results in his 
labor for men. And when he bids men call him 
Lord, he only asks them to reverence in him 
the supreme claims of self-denying service. He 



178 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

is king, because above all others he is mighty in 
the power of his love. 

Wisdom. Even Christian men think too little 
today of the sagacity and breadth of Jesus. In 
him we find the profoundest wisdom and orig- 
inality just where, on natural principles, we 
should not expect it. It was an unschooled 
wisdom, the wisdom of the practical man, the 
wisdom of the spiritual man, not the wisdom of 
the student, and yet a wisdom greater than any 
scholar or philosopher has ever exhibited. It 
did not come from books, or from travel, or from 
wide experience of men and affairs. It seems to 
have been inborn. Everything in his age and 
country was against the appearance of such a 
wisdom. For here breadth seems to spring from 
Jewish narrowness, insight from legalistic ex- 
ternalism, and practicality from a system which 
had left common sense behind. Surely the people 
who sat in darkness saw a great light (Matthew 
4: 16). 

There is a reasonableness, sanity and self- 
mastery in Jesus which put him immediately in 
the class of great men, and before which all 
charges of being a visionary fall harmless. He 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 79 

took large views. He refused to be caught in the 
eddies of the current of his times. He always 
sailed in midstream. He was calmly superior to 
the one-sidedness, the prejudices and the extremes 
of his contemporaries. He has commended him- 
self to the better sense of all ages and races. The 
universal and eternal were strong in him. And 
this is the more noteworthy, when we remember 
his emphasis on the inner man, the spirit, and 
the life of prayer and faith. The temptation of 
such natures is always to extravagance and fana- 
ticism, though it has often happened, as in the 
case of Jesus, that the most unworldly spirits 
have seen the nature and trend of real life most 
clearly. Jesus was indeed an idealist but he was 
under no illusions. He was led of the Spirit, but 
he never deserted the sphere of the practical. 
He was foremost in the ranks of progress, but he 
was no iconoclast. He made ideal demands, but, 
rightly interpreted, he never forgot that his fol- 
lowers were human after all. Indeed, there often 
appears in his teaching a homely common sense, 
which might almost be mistaken for worldly 
wisdom. This remarkable balance both in word 
and in action seems not to have been the result 



l8o THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

of study or calculation, but to have been spon- 
taneous and natural to him. He had that high- 
est genius which enables a man to take in the 
whole situation at a glance, to see around things 
and behind them. 

The man of balance is often cold, judicial and 
incapable of decisive action, but Jesus combined 
balance with enthusiasm, wisdom with aggres- 
siveness, sanity with magnificent leadership. He 
made statements whose reasonableness none could 
deny, which yet set standards which none have 
ever reached. His breadth never dulled the 
sharpness of his cutting edge, nor did his large- 
ness of mind ever paralyze his ability to give 
the smashing blow. As the result of a judicial 
outlook on the situation, he could wait, but 
none ever acted with greater decisiveness than 
he, when the time for action came. 

In an age when precedent was everything, he 
had the wisdom and the firmness to be absolutely 
independent, allying himself or seeking alliance 
with no party, never compromising his truth for 
the sake of a following, never content with a 
partial success, never for a moment diverted from 
his great aim. Sometimes he is called a revolu- 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS l8l 

tionary and this is as warmly denied. The debate 
is due to his instinctive equipoise. He saw the 
good in the old and loved it, he built the new 
upon it. He did not put the new and the old 
as such into opposition. Rather he would have 
had the old become new. He recognized that 
there must be large changes; against some ex- 
crescences, like legalism, he waged open war; but 
he strove to carry the Old Testament religion in 
its essence on to its consummation, to deepen it, 
to individualize, spiritualize and give it warmth, 
to make it positive and universal. He never 
admitted that his spirit was alien to the spirit 
of the Old Testament, and died because he still 
claimed to be the Messiah of the Jews. "He 
was the boldest of reformers and the finest type 
of conservative" at the same time. 

In an age when men thought of nothing but 
precepts and external duties and refined upon 
them beyond endurance, Jesus steadfastly dealt 
with the inner man, and with great principles of 
life and conduct. He might have started a hun- 
dred useful individual reforms in Palestine, but 
he refused to be turned aside from his great work 
of recreating men, and thus making a new world. 



l82 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

This fundamental business was his one great 
reform. He would not be entangled in the details 
of politics, nor would he define narrowly the ap- 
plications of his principles to the minor affairs 
of life. He left his teaching flexible, living, ever 
adaptable to new conditions, not tied to his age, 
which would soon pass away. He did this not 
so much with an eye to the future, however, as 
because he prized so highly men's spiritual in- 
dependence, the value of the moral and spiritual 
self-education involved in applying these inner 
principles to the details and exigencies of daily 
living. This one thing evinces a penetration, 
sagacity and largeness of mind which make 
Jesus the supreme guide in the realm of religion 
and morals. The result of it has been that the 
men of every age have come to Jesus with their 
deepest problems, and have received an answer 
so profound and apt that it has seemed as if he 
spoke to them alone. 

Possibly the finest illustration of Jesus' intellec- 
tual and moral poise is seen in his exquisite sense 
of proportion in the realm of truth, his genius 
for putting first things first, for bringing order 
out of moral confusion and thus substituting 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 183 

light for darkness. His placing of religion and 
morals on a par and yet religion first, his balance 
between the individual and society, his equilib- 
rium of the active and passive virtues, his com- 
bination of self-renunciation and a practical life 
in the world, are not only evidences of the high- 
est wisdom, but are the richest blessings which the 
world has ever received from a teacher's lips. 

Jesus' wisdom may be viewed too as insight. 
He seemed to see with perfect clearness into every 
situation, but especially into the soul of man. 
He is a greater "knower of the human heart" 
than ever Shakespeare was. With unerring glance 
he analyzes the hidden springs of motive and 
reports his analysis in such simple terms that 
men in all ages recognize in it a moral photograph 
of themselves. As John says, he knew what was 
in man. Indeed, he was the first discoverer of 
the infinite value and dignity of the human soul, 
of the common man, of the individual. So he 
began, as no other reformer before him had ever 
begun, with the common man. He was a com- 
mon man himself. He knew, sympathized with 
and prized the common man. He made common 
men the leaders of his new movement. He loved 



184 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the crowds. His one great method was to come 
into touch with just as many people as he pos- 
sibly could, and pour himself into them. He 
had the utmost faith in what men might become 
in fellowship with his Father and theirs. He 
therefore dared to try to attract them with a 
spiritual kingdom and to use spiritual means in 
so doing. He trusted everything at last to an 
appeal to reality and the deepest realities. This 
was an original and amazing venture, which 
could only prove its wisdom by its success. But 
it did succeed; it has succeeded. The world in 
our own lifetime, however, is only just waking 
up to its full significance, and now only beginning 
to give Jesus' experiment its full leeway. We 
agree now that men are infinitely valuable, that 
successful movements must grow from the people 
up, that spiritual means are the only really effect- 
ive ones, and that, if the world is to be saved at 
all, it must be saved in Jesus' way. 

It is simply of a piece with the foregoing, that 
Jesus had a wonderful way of seeing the central 
point in every problem, of cutting the Gordian 
knot of every perplexity, of answering questions 
in a way which left the old debate behind and 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 85 

brought men out into the heavenly light of a 
higher world, and of threading his way through 
the mazes and complexities of his historical situa- 
tion with a sureness which confounded his con- 
temporaries. 1 

Jesus' wisdom was wholly practical; nothing 
abstract, speculative, dialectic here. Simplicity 
and directness were his method. He built no 
lofty pyramid of logic, nor did he even think of 
attempting a system. Such things were entirely 
foreign to his mind. Rather he spoke out of 
his experience of blessing straight to the hearts 
of men, and this, though unmeditated, was the 
highest art. Of all the world's greatest teachers, 
Jesus alone spoke so that the common people 
not only understood him, but were delighted 
with him. Not even Paul can claim an equality 
with him here. He told men what he knew and 
it had a wonderful self-evidencing quality. It 
gave an impression of reality, which, twenty 
centuries afterwards, clings to his words and 
gives them perennial freshness and power. He 

x No illustration of this is more comprehensive than the ac- 
count of the Temptation. His moral insight in detecting what 
was wrong in each subtle proposition was incomparably delicate 
and keen. 



l86 TEE MAN OF NAZARETH 

filled the world with a new and immediate sense 
of God, which it has never since lost. "He 
brought, as it were, the perfume of another and 
higher sphere in his garments, and it floated out 
upon the universal air." In the simplest, most 
direct way, he just told men how to live, and the 
loveliest and noblest characters of history have 
been those who have come the nearest to being 
and doing just what he said. He was a new 
type of man, and created a new type of humanity. 
His astuteness consisted largely in doing the 
simplest thing, the thing which lay so near his 
hand, that most men would have overlooked it. 
He had new truth. Most other men in his posi- 
tion would have labored to create new terms to 
express it, and so would have had a futile, clumsy 
and unmeaning apparatus with no connection 
with the past and no appeal to the present. But 
such a method probably never occurred to Jesus. 
He found religious concepts already in use like 
Kingdom of God, Messiah, Father (for God) and 
salvation. He seized upon these, purified and ele- 
vated them, freed them from their errors and 
limitations, and made them speak a new and 
higher message to men. This was the only sen- 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 187 

sible thing to do; it reveals the instinct of the 
practical man. The history of this process, 
traced in former chapters, shows in Jesus a 
genius, a breadth, a patience, and an ability in 
instilling new conceptions, which command the 
profoundest admiration. 

Though Jesus had some tearing down to do, 
he did not delight in it, as do so many men with 
new ideas. Rather, his teaching and work were 
decidedly positive and constructive. He was one 
of the great builders. He laid foundations so 
broad and deep that his church has never needed 
to be anxious about their solidity and sufficiency. 
To be sure, he weakened the walls of Judaism, 
but, when the Jewish state fell in ruins, his own 
edifice already shone forth in beauty and strength. 
But possibly the finest illustration of his practical 
wisdom was his refusal to appeal to authority, 
to tradition, or even to lay final stress on the 
Old Testament scripture. He preferred to ad- 
dress himself directly to the conscience, the reason 
and the will. He evoked all the nobler emotions 
and rallied them on his side. Men felt that here 
was a new method, the appeal to truth, to com- 
mon sense, to reality. It was Jesus' way. It is 



1 88 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

sincere. It is effective. It is ultimate. If it 
does not finally succeed, nothing can. 

In conclusion we may say, that whether we 
regard the character, the substance or the method 
of his wisdom, the world is still sitting at the 
Great Teacher's feet. 

Power. Rising from a fresh and intimate 
study of the gospels, we must say that, after all, 
the dominant impression left by the portrait of 
Jesus is that of power, of the greatness and force 
of his personality. And this same feeling is ex- 
pressed by Tennyson's famous line, "Strong Son 
of God, Immortal Love," and by Mark's first 
comment on Jesus, "He taught as one who had 
authority." Power is the constant impression 
made by him on the men of his time; on John the 
Baptist, on his disciples, on the multitudes, on his 
foes, on the Sanhedrin, on Pilate. Whatever his at- 
titude towards Jesus might be, there was no one 
who was not deeply conscious of the vigor of his 
character. To the Galilean centurion, "he seemed 
like a commander who was born to be obeyed." 
The Gadarene felt that he was in the presence 
of one who could order out a legion of demons. 
He stirred the whole nation to the bottom, and 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 89 

the chief priests themselves confessed that he 
was like to turn them out. 

And Jesus was fully conscious of his power 
from the very beginning of his ministry. He 
knew that he had in himself resources more than 
sufficient for his great task. All the solicita- 
tions in the Temptation presuppose his power; 
the last one even implies his ability to conquer the 
entire world. Jesus does not deny that he can 
do these things, but he sees that they would 
involve misuse of power, and so refuses to engage 
in them. The personal moral problem for Jesus 
was largely one of self-restraint, of too much 
energy rather than too little. Note the names 
of strength and aggressiveness he gives his dis- 
ciples; he calls Simon, the Rock, and James and 
John, Sons of Thunder. He made men strong. 
He had power to give away. 

Jesus seems to have had perfect physical 
health. He was capable of long continued, stren- 
uous labor, a kind of work, too, which called for 
large expenditures of emotion and sympathy and 
sapped the nervous force. Yet he was never ill 
and rarely tired. All he ever needed was a night's 
rest. With unimpaired energy he pressed the 



190 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

battle to the very end. His body was of that 
noblest type, which unites all the more delicate 
and finer nervous mechanism with glorious phys- 
ical strength. So he was a perfectly normal 
man, a man almost disconcertingly natural. He 
had the sanguine, fiery temperament, was en- 
thusiastic, brave and hopeful. In his inmost soul 
welled a deep spring of joy. He had a sense of 
humor. He loved children and liked to watch 
their games. He was capable of a sternness of 
indignation against hypocrisy and wrong, which 
sometimes flared forth to the discomfiture of his 
foes. Yet all was under the control of the strong 
man. Irritability is the vice of saints and heroes, 
but Jesus seems to have been calmly superior to 
the little vexations which so frequently call forth 
an exhibition of the weaknesses of high-strung 
spiritual men. He seems to have had not the 
slightest trace of our modern neurasthenia. It 
is this self-mastery which peculiarly impressed 
his disciples. Matthew speaks of his quietness 
of demeanor and his gracious patience (Matthew 
12: 19, 20); Paul of the mildness and gentleness 
of Christ, his "sweet reasonableness," as Matthew 
Arnold would say (2 Cor. 10: 1); Peter of his 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 19I 

composure and faith in the midst of suffering 
and his silence under insult (i Pet. 2: 23). Jesus 
had a great, energetic, warm, aggressive nature, 
but he never let it carry him beyond the bounds 
set by love and self-respect. 

He overflowed with vitality. He was a spring- 
ing fountain of life and power. The sick were 
healed by his touch or even by his word of com- 
mand. The sinful and discouraged went from 
his presence with a new purity and hope. In 
him, says John, was life. He came that men 
might have life and have it more abundantly. He 
was so rich in spiritual goods that he gave with- 
out thought, as it were, extravagantly. As in 
the case of all strong men, the multitudes gath- 
ered about him, hung on him, listened spellbound 
to his words, sought to share his wonderful 
energy. 

Jesus strikes us as a man of unlimited and 
mighty resources. He never seemed at a loss. 
He always knew what he would do (John 6: 6). 
He dominated every scene. The shrewdest lead- 
ers of his nation found their most adroit schemes 
to entrap him as ineffectual as the green withes 
with which his foes tried to bind Samson. He 



I92 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

had a wisdom of simplicity and expedients of 
love in his heart, of which worldly men had 
never dreamed. Angry foes, with murder in their 
eyes, might surround him, but there was such 
authority in his very mien that they instinctively 
made a way for him through their ranks, and 
dared not lay a hand upon him. 1 The vicissi- 
tudes of his career were many and keenly felt, 
but he mastered every situation and solved every 
problem from the viewpoint of a higher sphere 
than this. Even when a defenceless prisoner 
before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, he is still the 
central figure, calm and undismayed. We feel 
that, after all, the silent sufferer is supreme. 
Though they seem to be judging him, he in 
reality is judging them and they seem to mistrust 
it. In condemning him, they are themselves 
condemned, and all the ages affirm the sentence. 
It is not strange that this man of power should 
add to his certainty, firmness and consistent 
bravery a striking personal dignity, a sort of 
kingly bearing. There was no pride in it. He 
never acted a part. There was not the slightest 

1 Compare the similar escapes of the missionary Paton from 
the cannibals of the New Hebrides. 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 93 

suspicion of pretension to a position which did 
not really belong to him. There was no service 
too lowly for him to render. He had none of 
the airs of the great, or any aloofness or aus- 
terity, yet his self-respect was perfect. It was the 
wholly natural dignity of true greatness, of simple 
integrity, of the seriousness of the highest purpose. 
It probably never occurred even to any of his 
enemies to trifle with him, till the rude underlings 
smote and mocked him at his trial. We instinc- 
tively feel that none of his disciples ever dared 
to take liberties with him. The only approach 
to it occurred when rash Peter attempted to dis- 
suade him from going to the cross, and we all 
know how that resulted. 

In other words, he was Lord. This, of course, 
was involved in his Messiahship and, especially, 
in his work as Founder of the Kingdom of God. 
And he was Lord from the first. John the Bap- 
tist intuitively felt his superiority and yielded 
to his preference at the baptism. The bartering 
crowd in the Temple owned his authority and 
fled at his gesture. The sons of Zebedee left 
their nets to follow him. He was always Master. 
No disciple ever questioned it for a moment, and 



194 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

Jesus never waived his prerogative. He naturally 
and easily took and held the position. He never 
consulted with any of his disciples about his plans 
or methods. He never asked anybody's advice. 
He initiated all new movements on his own re- 
sponsibility. He simply led the way and the 
disciples followed in his steps. He commanded 
and they obeyed. He called himself Lord and 
King and they accepted him as such. 1 

So he was the Leader, the absolute leader, and 
yet so unselfish, so fair, so sympathetic, so pa- 
tient, so inspiring that no leader has ever since 
equalled him. He bound men to him with the 
bonds of love. In spite of disappointment, mis- 
understanding, fiercest opposition, most dreadful 
danger, he roused in them a reverence, an adora- 
tion, a deathless affection, a devotion to his per- 
son, which did not stop at the sacrifice of life it- 
self. Even today, twenty centuries after his death, 
there is no single individual, though he be the 



1 This independence of Jesus had its root not in pride, but in 
his certainty of God and his absolute trust in him. He did not 
consult men but his Father, and when he rose from prayer, every- 
thing had been decided. The finest independence of feeling and 
action is the fruit of a life of prayerful humility. Cf. Robertson, 
Sermons, First Series, pp. 270L 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 95 

ruler of an empire, who could summon so great a 
host of ardent followers, ready for any sacrifice, 
as could Jesus. He was the greatest of leaders 
for he was the supreme inspirer of men. He 
was the supreme inspirer of men, because he, the 
greatest of them all, unreservedly gave himself 
for them, even to the death of the cross. This 
made him the unrivalled Captain of the hosts of 
righteousness, yesterday, today and forever. 

The force of this Personality, as we have 
shown, has crossed all the oceans and streams 
down through all the centuries. How mighty must 
have been the power resident in him, who could 
create the initial impulse and supply the con- 
tinuous energy for such a movement in our 
race! 

Antitheses. Nothing is more impressive than 
the opposites in Jesus, except the nice equipoise 
which they always maintain. It is an iridescent 
character; you get a new and changing view from 
every different angle, and yet all is ever beautiful 
and harmonious. Most of these usually anti- 
thetic qualities have already been discussed, but 
we make bold to catalogue the most prominent 
of them at some risk of repetition, lest any reader 



196 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

should fail to appreciate this noteworthy feature 
of the personality of Jesus. 

He was a thorough Jew, had never known 
aught but Jewish influences, yet he was a Greek 
in his love of nature and his joy in h'fe and an 
American in the strenuosity of his work and the 
practical cast of his mind. He was a child of his 
age, and yet has become the leader of every age. 

He was a wonderful combination of the active 
and the passive virtues, the man of love who 
could not and would not avoid conflict, the 
Prince of Peace, who died bitterly hated by his 
many foes. In fact, he seemed to unite in himself 
the noblest traits of manhood and womanhood. 
He was strong without a trace of violence, and 
gentle without a trace of weakness. Love alone 
can explain this. 

In him we find an extraordinary union of the 
contemplative and the active. He loved the 
crowd and the thronged street, yet he often stole 
away to the mountain to be alone with himself 
and God. He courted popularity, thrust himself 
on the attention of men, compelled them to hear 
his message, but, unlike Paul, was strangely reti- 
cent about his inner experience and men felt that 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 97 

he died with secrets undisclosed. He was con- 
scious of a fullness of life and a wealth of power, 
and yet his prayerfulness shows a sense of need 
which only God could supply. There was a 
secret life behind the scenes which is necessary 
to explain the Jesus whom the world knows. 

He was refined and dignified, yet never cold 
and haughty. He was enthusiastic and sym- 
pathetic, yet always wise. He was deeply spiri- 
tual, but he was no fanatic, deadly in earnest in 
his hatred of sin, but no ascetic. 

He made plans, looked out into the future, 
but within the outlines of his plans, he was a 
thorough-going opportunist. He showed the most 
remarkable breadth of conception, and yet be- 
stowed the utmost attention on details. He talked 
with each casual inquirer as though that were his 
one business in life. Never was there a busier 
man, and yet he always had time. 

No man ever gave himself more unreservedly 
to his career, and yet he showed a wonderful 
freedom from anxiety about the outcome. He 
understood how to wait, but he never hesitated. 
He knew his hour with unerring certainty and, 
when it came, he acted with amazing decisiveness. 



198 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

He was a teacher, a preacher, a poet, but at 
the same time the most practical of empire 
builders. 

He joined the authority of Lordship with the 
most genuine humility, the intrepid self-reliance 
of God's Anointed with implicit obedience to his 
Father. 

His heart responded to all life's innocent 
pleasures, his joy was real and deep, yet he was 
the man of sorrows, the familiar friend of grief. 
He knew no antithesis between self-realization 
and self-denial. He found himself in self-giving. 
He grew stronger in spirit the more fully he de- 
voted himself to others' good. 

He was a natural conservative, yet a true pro- 
gressive, and in many matters such a radical 
that the world has not yet caught up with him. 
He was an individualist of the most pronounced 
type, and yet he preached a social conception, 
the kingdom of God, as his highest ideal. 

He put an almost equal emphasis on ethics 
and religion. He introduced a new and freer 
religion with a deeper and sterner morality. He 
preached both righteousness and love with the 
same insistence. His love for sinners was genuine 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 1 99 

and amazing, yet he had no illusions about them 
and never hinted the slightest excuse for their 
sin. 

Though he was unschooled, the world has gone 
to school to him, and that in the very highest 
studies. Though a common man, he has im- 
pressed the world as inexpressibly and uniquely 
great. "He seems to include and bring to perfec- 
tion in himself every conceivable type of goodness." 
"The white light in him gathers up all the split 
and partial colors of our little spectrums." "All 
these opposites are only beams from the diamond 
of his soul," and the center of the diamond was 
the divine spirit that dwelt in him. 

These varied and almost contrary qualities 
exactly fit Jesus to be the moral and spiritual 
leader of our race. They make him a sort of 
universal man. Each sex, each time of life, every 
age, every nation and every class finds in him 
something strangely familiar and genial, some- 
thing to admire and love. The most opposite 
sects claim him with equal enthusiasm, and the 
most antipathetic men and women join in a com- 
mon devotion to his person. The new world-life 
of our age, a united humanity with its new needs, 



200 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

can discover in no other the diversity and uni- 
versality of character which it demands, and 
can see in none but Jesus its Lord and Savior. 

The most difficult ethical achievement is the 
maintenance of the moral balance in a many- 
sided personality, yet Jesus seems to have at- 
tained success at this point with perfect ease. 
With all these antithetic qualities, he never seems 
to be a complicated character, but always, at 
first view and indeed in the last analysis, im- 
presses us with the simplicity, harmony and 
unity of his inner life, with the artlessness of his 
self-mastery, and the naturalness of his greatness. 1 

Goodness. There is a so-called goodness that 
men instinctively hate. All the satirists have 
levelled their shafts at it. The more virile and 



1 We quote Bushnell's famous paragraph on this topic. "Men 
undertake to be spiritual and they become ascetic; or, endeavor- 
ing to hold a liberal view of the comforts and pleasures of society, 
they are soon buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions; or, 
holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every particular sin, 
they become legal and fall out of liberty; or, charmed with the 
noble and heavenly liberty, they run to negligence and irrespon- 
sible living; so the earnest become violent, the fervent fanatical 
and censorious, the gentle waver, the firm turn bigots, the liberal 
grow lax, the benevolent ostentatious. Poor human infirmity 
can hold nothing steady. When the pivot of righteousness is 
broken, the scales must needs slide off their balance." 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 201 

practical men are, the more they despise it. But 
ridicule grows dumb before the goodness of Jesus. 
His peerless character somehow never excites 
jealousy or dislike. Rather it is winsome and 
attractive. The bigger the man is, the surer he 
is to praise Jesus. We feel that to oppose Jesus 
is to judge ourselves. To be sure, Jesus had 
enemies, but they hated him because he antago- 
nized their sins and interfered with their financial 
and popular influence. They objected to him 
not because he was too good, but because, think- 
ing themselves the patterns of piety and the 
bulwarks of the state, they considered him the 
ally of irreligion and disorder. Some men today 
will take the same attitude towards Jesus for the 
same reason. He stands in their way. But, by 
their action, they only reveal to their fellows 
the smallness of their thoughts and the baseness 
of their hearts. The world has about made up 
its mind that Jesus is right. 

Men like the perfect honesty of Jesus. He 
was simple as a child. He was grounded in truth. 
He was sound to the very core. He was abso- 
lutely genuine. He had a passion for righteous- 
ness and reality, a consuming hatred of artifi- 



202 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

ciality and hypocrisy, a sternness against evil which 
is never obscured by his love for sinners. His 
character gives the impression of a singular and 
pellucid purity, no mixture of low with high 
motives, some form of selfishness pulling one 
way and love or duty pulling the other. In this 
man there is not a single false note, no morbid- 
ness, no vanity, no posing, no pretence, no false 
humility, no religious extravagance, no fanaticism 
or asceticism, no attempt to seem other than 
he was. In matters of duty, he never dreamed 
of compromise to avoid conflict. He thought it 
better to die than to sin, and this principle of 
his was put to a fiery test, when, in the question 
of the tribute money, he refused to equivocate 
with full knowledge of the consequences and threw 
away his life. He could endure crucifixion, but 
he could not shade the truth a single particle. 
This perfect sincerity is the secret of the spon- 
taneity and naturalness of his life, of the straight- 
forwardness of his course, of his fairness and 
candor in debate, of his constant appeal to reality, 
and gives him the charm which his disciples felt, 
when they said that he was full of grace and 
truth. 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 203 

His goodness was not only founded on the bed- 
rock of honesty, but was utterly unselfish. His 
one object in life was to bring men into the bless- 
ing of loving obedience to the Father's will. 
This purpose of love ruled supreme, unrivalled by 
a thought of personal advantage or comfort or 
the praise of men. He held to this high aim in 
spite of all temptations to become involved in 
other matters, in spite of all the vicissitudes and 
disappointments of a very varied career, in spite 
of the fact that he discovered by and by that it 
led straight to the cross. His bold earnestness 
in his great enterprise made him deaf to all the 
allurements of self-seeking and gives him the love 
of all those who admire the brave and the true. 

The goodness of Jesus attracts men because we 
feel that he dealt honestly with himself, that he 
practised what he preached, that his high ideals 
and stern demands made on others had their 
first application to his own life, that he was more 
exacting with himself than with any of his hearers. 
With this was naturally joined a sort of fairness 
in his treatment of sinners, a willingness to look 
at the matter from their point of view, a kindly 
appreciation of the first efforts to struggle up- 



204 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

ward, however clumsy and feeble, a helpful hand 
stretched out gladly to aid every aspiration 
toward goodness. Matthew tells us that it was 
Jesus' custom to do his best for bruised reeds and 
not to throw them away as useless, to conserve 
the little heat left in the smoking wick till he 
could fan it again into flame. Such was the 
patience and tenderness of the Savior. There 
was nothing exclusive or narrow, then, about 
his goodness. Like the sunshine and the rain, 
it was for all. His great heart took in the weak- 
est and the strongest, without any distinction 
whatever. Yet he never for a moment in false 
mercy let down the high standards of right- 
eousness which he came to establish for man- 
kind. 

All this was possible because Jesus himself 
was involved in the moral struggle. He was 
tempted like as we are. Though he never sinned, 
his goodness grew deeper and richer year by year, 
and came at last to its finest maturity. It was 
therefore a real attainment, a real victory. If 
it had not been so, his goodness would belong, 
as it were, to another sphere external to us, he 
would be like the cold marble, icily faultless, a 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 205 

perfect character fitted to chill us into discourage- 
ment and despair. But fighting our fight as he 
did, struggling with our foes on the same field 
where we find ourselves, and finally conquering 
with the weapons which we must use, he is to 
us the pioneer who leads us on, the victor who 
cheers us in the daily struggle, the Light and 
Hope of the World. He makes those who trust 
and follow him believe that, although they start 
at a lower level than he, they will win as he 
did. 

Greatness. It seems almost unnecessary to 
give even a paragraph to the Greatness of Jesus. 
All that has been written combines to give us 
an overwhelming impression of it. Many great 
men are great in some one quality or aptitude, 
but the greatest men are great in more ways than 
one. So it was with Jesus. Among men he 
ranks as the greatest Character, the greatest 
Teacher, the greatest Organizer of righteousness, 
the greatest spiritual Inspirer and Leader of man- 
kind. Among the noblest of his brethren he rises 
like Mount Everest in the Himalayas, supreme, 
unrivalled, alone. 

Whether we consider the disadvantages of his 



2o6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

birth and environment compared with the vast- 
ness and permanence of his influence, the unique- 
ness of his spiritual experience, his mastery and 
originality in the sphere of religion and ethics, 
his preeminence as the Leader of humanity in 
purity and love, the fruitfulness of his thought 
and the inspiration of his personality for the 
uplifting and continuous progress of the indi- 
vidual and the race, his founding and perpetual 
revitalizing of the kingdom of God, or the per- 
fection of his personal character, we must all 
agree that in Jesus we see the moral and spiritual 
Lord and Savior of mankind. 

Loneliness. Jesus, however, paid the penalty 
of his supreme greatness by a supreme loneliness. 
Though he did his very best, he could not avoid 
being misapprehended. His parents thought 
him a strange child, and at the height of his 
popularity his mother and relatives came to seize 
him because they had concluded that he had 
gone crazy. His own brothers looked on him as 
an impractical dreamer. Neither the leaders 
nor the common people ever really comprehended 
his spiritual purposes, and this was only less true 
of his disciples. "Those who understood him best 



THE CHARACTER OF JESUS 207 

understood him only half." * And we now see 
that it could not have been otherwise. In many 
respects, Jesus was at least twenty centuries ahead 
of his time. He belonged to that future age of 
spiritual glory of which he so often spoke. As he 
passed through the world in which he lived, he must 
have felt himself, in the last analysis, a stranger. 
Finally, he found himself deserted, first by the 
people, who had once followed him with a super- 
ficial enthusiasm, and then by his own disciples. 
One of his dearest friends denied that he ever 
knew him, and he was openly rejected and cruci- 
fied by the leaders of the nation which he came 
to save. Was there ever sorrow like this sorrow, 
a cup of tragic grief more bitter than this? If 
Jesus had been by instinct a recluse or one of 
those stern, cold characters who prefer to walk 
alone, this spiritual isolation could have been 
more easily borne. But Jesus was the very 
friendliest of men, he had a great, sensitive heart, 
he lived in the sunshine of love. To such a man, 

1 This view of the matter suggests that, instead of giving us an 
exaggerated picture, the evangelists never did Jesus justice. In 
his case it is probably literally true that the half was never told. 
Why should we not understand Jesus better than the men of his 
time? Our time is largely the resultant of his life and teaching. 



208 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

profound loneliness must have been the keenest 
of trials. He walked among men, the crowds 
pressed upon him, he journeyed surrounded by 
his friends, and yet he was alone. He was cut 
off from the sympathy for which his whole nature 
cried out, and which was indeed necessary to 
the immediate success of his great life purpose. 
Here is the real pathos of this wonderful character, 
the pathos of supreme greatness in a little world. 

We have now come to the innermost shrine 
of this personality, that sacred sphere of reserve 
and mystery which Jesus could not reveal, and 
even if we knock, we cannot enter. "No man 
knows me but the Father," said Jesus (Mat- 
thew ii : 27). "He has a name written which no 
one knows but he himself" (Rev. 19: 12). In this 
hidden life, Jesus was alone, but alone with God. 
This is his Holy of Holies. Here is the treasure 
house of his power, and the fountain, whence flow 
the streams of divine salvation to all the world. 

This unshared and solitary elevation of charac- 
ter should not repel men, for, after all, it is be- 
cause Jesus is above us that he can help us up. 
It is because he is stronger than we, that we may 
flee to him in every hour of need. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FINALITY OF JESUS 

That was a great day for the human race, 
when the last touches were put upon the glorious 
Parthenon, and architecture came to its perfec- 
tion of beauty. That was a great day when 
Raphael completed the Sistine Madonna and 
painting reached its highest mark. Those were 
great days when men invented the steam engine, 
the telegraph, the electric light and the telephone. 

But above all other days was the supreme day 
when at last the Perfect Man appeared. 1 Cicero 
in his Tusculan Disputations tells us that the 
ancient thinkers often discussed what sort of 
man the just man would be; but nobody dis- 
cusses that now, for the ideal of humanity has 
been revealed in Jesus. The wonderful dreams 
of the world's philosophies and religions have 
come true at last in the Man of Nazareth. All 

1 For extended proof of the moral perfection of Jesus, see 
pp. 43-46. 

209 



2IO THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

their prophecies, longings and imaginings find 
their fulfilment and more in him. 

All attempts to draw a rival character are 
hopeless failures. Nietzsche's Superman repels 
all the finer feelings of mankind, and an attempt 
at its realization would drown civilization in 
blood. The glory of the Caesars and the Na- 
poleons, the Rothschilds and the Vanderbilts 
fades. Even great benefactors of the human race, 
like Washington and Lincoln, Jenner and Pas- 
teur, are judged and honored only by their like- 
ness to Jesus. Even those who are not his fol- 
lowers find in him the norm of conduct. John 
Stuart Mill, who did not pretend to be a Chris- 
tian, says, "Religion cannot be said to have 
made a bad choice in pitching upon Jesus as 
the ideal representative and guide of humanity; 
nor even now would it be easy, even for an un- 
believer, to find a better translation of the rule 
of virtue from the abstract into the concrete 
than the endeavor so to live that Christ would 
approve our lives." More universally than we 
usually think, this sentiment has become an es- 
sential of the mental furnishing of the non- 
christian part of Christendom. Jesus, or the 



THE FINALITY OF JESUS 211 

more generalized Spirit of Christ, is really the 
moral standard of the whole Western World, 
accepted by the ordinary man as unconsciously 
and absolutely as the air or the sunlight. It is 
indisputably the cornerstone of Christian civiliza- 
tion, "the undying root of all that is best in 
modern life." 

The magnitude of this fact can possibly be best 
appreciated if we consider what the loss of this 
ideal would mean, if indeed such loss were think- 
able. It would set back the clock of spiritual 
progress twenty centuries. It would plunge the 
nations into moral chaos and disaster. It would 
bring a universal sense of an overwhelming and 
irreparable world-calamity. Nothing can be imag- 
ined that would so deeply and permanently sad- 
den mankind. 1 

We cannot, however, rest the finality of Jesus 
on his moral perfection alone, though this is and 
must ever be the starting point. We may con- 
ceive a morally perfect man, who would never be 
known beyond the limits of his Nazareth. All 

1 Compare Romanes' Thoughts on Religion, p. 29. When 
Romanes gave up the thought of Christ and God, he "suffered 
the sharpest pang of which his nature was susceptible" and "the 
universe for him lost its soul of loveliness." 



212 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

morally perfect men are not necessarily identical 
in character. Indeed the probabilities are that 
each one would be different, just as no two ex- 
quisite sunsets are alike. Filled with the op- 
timism of Jesus, we may go a step further and 
ask whether the world is not likely to see perfect 
characters produced by the Spirit in the future, 
especially in those days when "God's will is done 
on earth even as it is done in heaven." 

Yet, even so, Jesus would still be "the first 
born among many brethren" (Romans 8: 29), 
the pioneer, the road breaker of our salvation 
(Hebrews 2: 10), our forerunner into the holiest 
(Hebrews 6: 20). Though there may be varieties 
of perfect men, he will always be the pattern and 
the prototype, the leader and perfecter of faith. 
Just because he came first, he occupies the unique 
place, which can never be taken from him. In 
the course of our history there may appear many 
Americans as great, wise and patriotic as Wash- 
ington, but no other can ever be the Father of 
his Country. So Jesus, because he was the Be- 
ginning of Christianity, the Founder of the King- 
dom of God, has an inalienable preeminence. 

But Jesus has a preeminence far beyond this, 



THE FINALITY OF JESUS 213 

a uniqueness which guarantees his finality. And 
here we should proceed slowly and circumspectly, 
considering all the factors of the problem. The 
quiet, morally perfect man whom we have al- 
ready imagined, would by his very nature desire 
that other men should enter into his life of bless- 
ing and, more, would have so much of the Savior- 
heart that he would actively try to bring them 
into it. But we can well conceive that his efforts 
might be confined to a narrow circle. It is sig- 
nificant here that Jesus himself did not work 
outside of Nazareth until he was about thirty 
years of age. But Jesus felt a call to a wider 
service, the call to bring salvation to the nation 
and the world. This, as has been well said, was 
the greatest thought which ever entered a human 
mind and left it sane. Nor was this all, nor in- 
deed the most important thing. The great point 
is that he felt in himself the resources adequate 
to so great a work, and that this self-judgment 
has been justified by history. To moral perfec- 
tion, to the Savior-heart, was added not only 
the wide outlook, but ability, capacity, power. 
In the end it all comes back to the greatness of 
his personality, the mighty strength of his soul, 



214 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

the breadth and depth, yes, the size of the man. 
And this was natural to him. He was made 
that way. It was enduement or endowment, as 
you please. Peter tells the whole story, "God 
anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with 
power." 

Of this most significant of all human facts 
twenty centuries are the proof. Jesus changed 
the whole course of history. He created a new 
sense of God, a new type of man, a new social 
order and a new world of life and freedom. It 
is the best world men have ever known, but Jesus 
insistently demands that it must be far better 
still. And Jesus has done all this by moral and 
spiritual means, by giving his first attention to 
the spirit of the individual. He actually saves 
the individual man from selfishness, sensuality, 
pride, greed and hate, and saves him to a life 
of righteousness and unselfish love. It is not only 
that, if men will follow his prescriptions, they will 
be made over, but he himself seems in some 
strange way to be the embodiment of the power 
which urges men and the world on to such a life 
of loving obedience and service. 

Moreover, he does all that religion can be asked 



THE FINALITY OF JESUS 215 

to do. He brings men to God. He is the Way, 
the Truth and the Life. Yes, better still, he 
brings God to men. He who yields to the spell 
of his personality, surrenders to his love, unites 
his life to that of Jesus, gets his spirit and shares 
his purpose, that man, working with him, finds 
God in Jesus, sees the Father in him, gains his 
unshakable faith, and enters into communion 
with the Most High. 

And Jesus grows on the world. Pharisees, 
philosophers, satirists, atheists, critics and psy- 
chologists, have all had their day with Jesus, 
but every new attack makes Jesus greater and 
stronger. Old conceptions of him may disappear, 
but they only give place to larger, juster and 
profounder views of his character and significance. 
As Browning sings, 

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 

Or decomposes but to recompose, 

Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 

Yes, Jesus grows on the world. The more 
men study him, the more he impresses them. 
Rival parties and classes claim him as their 
leader and authority. Nothing against which 



2l6 THE MAN OF NAZARETH 

he pronounced has any future in our new world. 
More and more it is seen that in him are the 
principles of social regeneration and that he 
alone can unite all men, and that only in himself. 
If the world is to be saved, he must be its Savior. 
And so he gains a universal significance. He 
leaves the stage of the historical and the personal 
and becomes an ideal, an atmosphere, a working 
principle, the basis of the coming age, which all 
far-seeing men perceive is to be more Christian 
than any which have preceded it. The world 
has not yet outgrown Jesus. It is just now at 
last catching his real meaning. 1 He still leads 
us on. 

In our marvelous world-history, Jesus is the 
greatest marvel of all. No one can ever take his 
place. All future saviors will acknowledge his 
supremacy and finality. His energy seems ex- 
haustless and indeed increasing. 

1 A single illustration. Fosdick quotes Dr. Samuel J. Barrows 
as saying, "We speak of Howard, Livingston, Beccaria and others 
as great penologists, who have profoundly influenced modern 
life; but the principles enunciated and the methods introduced 
by Jesus seem to me to stamp him as the greatest penologist of 
any age. He has needed to wait, however, nearly twenty cen- 
turies to find his principles and methods recognized in modern 
law and penology." 



THE FINALITY OF JESUS 21/ 

Men have always asked and are still asking 
the secret of this personality. It will never be 
wholly revealed. Paul's explanation was that 
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself, and that the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God shines on us from the face of 
Jesus. The Church in her enthusiasm for her 
Lord and Savior has tried to say this better and 
define it more narrowly. Whether it has alto- 
gether succeeded in the task may be a matter of 
debate, but one thing is perfectly plain: — This 
Jesus, so strangely and uniquely full of God, is 
Lord in a sphere beyond the reach of our highest 
thought. He therefore demands and deserves 
the wonder, reverence, love and supreme devotion 
of every human being. 



APPENDIX 

AN OUTLINE OF JESUS' CAREER 

Part I. The Life before the Ministry. 
B. C. 5 or 6— Fall of A. D. 26. 
Principal Events. 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 
2. The Quiet Years at Naz- 
areth. 
Part II. The Preliminary Events of the Ministry. 
Fall of A. D. 26 — Passover, April n, 27. 
Principal Events. 1. The Ministry of John the 
Baptist. 

2. The Baptism of Jesus. 

3. The Temptation of Jesus. 

4. The First Disciples. 

Part III. The Early Judean Ministry. 

Passover, April 11, 27 — December 27. 
Principal Events. 1. First Cleansing of the 
Temple. 

2. Interview with Nico- 

demus. 

3. Cooperation with John in 

his Ministry in Judea. 
Part IV. The Galilean Ministry. 

December 27 — Passover, April 18, 29. 
Principal Events (mostly topical). 

1. Jesus' Itinerant Preach- 
ing of the Kingdom and 
Miracles attract Great 
Multitudes. 
219 



220 APPENDIX 

Part IV. The Galilean Ministry — Continued. 

2. Jesus' Calling, Teaching 

and Organization of his 
Disciples. 

3. The Scribes and Pharisees 

increasingly hostile. 

4. The Crisis at Caper- 

naum. 

a. The Mission of the 

Twelve. 

b. The Feeding of the 

5,000. 

c. The Break with the 

People at Caper- 
naum. 

d. The Break with the 

Pharisees on Eating 
with Unwashed 
Hands. 
Part V. The Retirement in the North. 

Passover, April 18, 29 — November 29. 
Principal Events. 1. Instruction of Disciples, 
ending in Peter's 
Confession and Jesus' 
Prophecy of his Death. 
2. The Transfiguration and 
Jesus' Resolution to go 
up to his Death at 
Jerusalem. 
Part VI. The Perean Ministry. 

November 29 — Sunday, April 2, 30. 
The Perean Ministry was much like the Gali- 
lean, except that all was briefer, more pointed 
and more solemn. 



APPENDIX 221 

Part VI. The Perean Ministry— Continued. 

The data are too uncertain to justify a list of 
principal events. Suffice it to say that at the 
close Jesus goes up to Jerusalem from Perea 
by way of Jericho. 
Part VII. The Passion Week. 

April 2, 30 — April 9, 30. 

Principal Events. 1. The Triumphal Entry. 

2. Second Cleansing of the 

Temple. 

3. Conflicts with the Jewish 

Leaders. 

4. The Last Supper. 

5. Gethsemane and the Be- 

trayal. 

6. The Jewish Trial. 

7. The Roman Trial. 

8. The Crucifixion and 

Burial. 
Part VIII. The Forty Days. 

April 9, 30 — May 18, 30. 
Principal Events. 1. The Resurrection Morn- 
ing. 

2. The Appearances during 

Forty Days. 

3. The Ascension. 

(Note. — This chronological scheme is based on the supposition 
of a three year ministry. I am almost, though not quite, per- 
suaded to accept a two year ministry. But such a change would 
not alter the order or relative importance of these events. The 
substantial historicity of the Gospel of John is also presupposed. 
My acknowledgments are due to Stevens and Burton's Harmony 
of the Gospels, though I have freely amended their outline.) 



INDEX 



Adaptation of Christianity, 9 f . 
Aggressiveness of Jesus, 138 f., 

169 f. 
Antitheses of his Character, 

195-200 
Apocalyptic and its Influence 

on Jesus, 29 f., 62, 84-92 
Authority of Jesus, 114, 177 f., 

193 ff., 217 

Balance of Jesus, 178 ff., 198 f. 
Baptism of Jesus, 38-41 
Bringer of Salvation, 57 f. 
Broadening Outlook of Chris- 
tianity, 8 f . 

Caesaiea Philippi, Confession 

at, 37 f., 79 ff- 
Call of Jesus, 51-55 
Centurion, Gentile, 156 
Certainty of Jesus, 168 f. 
Character, 130 
Character of Jesus, 166-208 
Church, Jesus' View of it, 149- 

154, 159 
Clean and Unclean, 79, 105 f., 

109 
Clouds of Heaven, 89 ff . 
Coming, Second, 83-92, 161 f., 

165 
Common People, 30 f., 125, 

140 f., 183 f. 



Community, The New, 145 f., 

151 ff., 159 f. 
Constructiveness of Jesus, 

187 f. 
Conversions, 11 f. 
Courage of Jesus, 169 ff. 
Covenant, 145 
Covetousness, 131 
Crisis at Capernaum, 78 f. 
Cross, 146-149 

Death of Jesus, 80, 82 f., 135, 

143-149, 163 
Deserted, Jesus, 207 f. 
Devout, The, 31 
Dignity of Jesus, 192 f . 
Disadvantages of Jesus, 2 f., 

178 
Divorce, 108 
Doing God's Will, 129 f. 
Duties, Religious, 129 

Economic Situation of Pales- 
tine, 24 
End of the World, 131 ff. 

Faith, 122 

Fatherhood of God, 48 f., 103, 

117 f. 
Feeding of Five Thousand, 

78 f. 



223 



224 



INDEX 



Fellowship with God, Jesus', 
47 ff., 146 ff., 163, 166 ff. 

Finality of Jesus, 209-217 

Forgiveness, 122 

Founder of Kingdom, 58 f., 
85 f., 137 f- 

Gentile Mission, 143, 154-159 
Gethsemane, 146 f. 
God, 117 ff., 126 
Goodness of Jesus, 200-205 
Grace of God, 102 f. 
Greatness of Jesus, 205 f . 
Greek Influences, 23, 25 
Growth of Conception of 
Messiahship, 41-56 

Healings, 140, 191 
Healthiness of Jesus, 190 f. 
Historical Situation of Jesus, 

23-33 
Honesty of Jesus, 65, 166, 201 f . 
Humility of Jesus, 177 f. 

Inadequacy of Messianic Title, 

96 
Independence of Jesus, 180 f., 

194 
Independence, Spiritual, 125, 

182 
Influence of Jesus: 

On the Ages, 1, 4-18, 195, 

215 f. 
On Christianity, 7-10 
On Contemporaries, 3 f., 
188 f. 
Insight of Jesus, 112, 1832. 



Jewish Trial, 36 f., 94 f. 

John the Baptist, 32 f., 39 f., 

78, 80 f., 102, 150 f., 153 
Joy of Jesus, 171 f. 
Judaism and the Disciples, 

149-154 
Judea and Galilee Contrasted, 

24 f., 99 
Judge of Men, 59 

Kingdom of God, 58 f., 71-75, 
83 f., 116, 118-121, 131 f., 
134 f., 138, 156 f., i59ff-> 
163 f. 

Last Supper, 144 ff . 

Legalism and Jesus, 26 f., 97- 

110, 168 
Life, Inner, 124, 181 f. 
Life, The New, 1 21-135 
Loneliness of Jesus, 206 ff . 
Lordship of Jesus, 177 f., 193 ff., 

198, 217 
Love, 122, 126 ff. 
Love of Jesus, 126 f., 140-143, 

172-178, 203 f. 

Man, 125 

Martyrdoms, Testimony of, 

12 ff. 
Messianic Hope, 28 f., 34 f., 

60 ff. 
Messianism and Jesus, 34-96, 

i34 i- 
Mill, J. S., 45, 210 
Mission of Jesus, 53 f., 64, 152, 

160, 168 



225 



Moral Advance due to Jesus, 
14 ff. 

Old Testament and Jesus, 49 f ., 

98 f., 106-110, 154 f. 
Opportunism of Jesus, 68, 197 
Optimism of Jesus, 173 
Originality of Jesus, 20 f., 111- 

114 
Outline of Jesus' Career, 219 ff . 

Parties, Jewish, 25-31 
Pedagogic Difficulties of Jesus, 

68 ff. 
Perean Ministry, 92 
Perfection of Jesus, 43-46, 

209-212 
Personality of Jesus, 18-22, 65, 

200, 208, 212-215 
Peter's Confession. See Csesa- 

rea Philippi 
Pharisees, 26 f., 97 ff., 100 f., 

103-106, 150-153 
Political Difficulties of Jesus, 

7i 
Popularity of Jesus, 76 f. 
Power of Jesus, 188-194, 212 ~ 

215. See Influence of Jesus 
Practicality of Jesus, 185 f . 
Preaching of Jesus, 139 f. 
Presence, Continuing, 164 f. 
Proportion, Jesus' Sense of, 

113, 182 f. 
Publicans, 141 f. 

Reality, Jesus' Appeal to, 184, 
187 f. 



Recent Triumphs of Chris-. 

tianity, 16 ff. 
Refinement of Jesus, 176 
Religion, 102 f. 
Repentance, 121, 123 
Representative, God's, 56 f ., 

185 f. 
Reserve. Messianic, 71-75, 

77 f., 86 f. 
Respect for Personality, Jesus ', 

173, 182 
Resurrection of Jesus, 162 ff. 
Revolutionary? Was Jesus a, 

180 f. 
Righteousness, 121 
Rousseau, 45, 146 

Sabbath, 105, 108 

Sacrifice, 145 f. 

Sadducees, 25 f. 

Salvation, 12, 57 f., 123, 136 

Secret of Jesus, 208, 217 

Self-criticism and Self-purifica- 
tion of Christianity, 7 f. 

Self-mastery of Jesus, 190 f. 

Separation from Judaism, 149- 
154 

Seriousness of Jesus, 113, 120 

Service, 128 

Sexual Purity, 128 

Sinners, 31, 141 

Social Attitude, 130 

Social Nature of Jesus, 171 f., 

175 f- 

Son of Man, 85 ff . 

Spirit of Jesus, our Ideal, 210 f. 

State, The, 131 



226 



INDEX 



Success, Immediate, of Jesus, 

75 i; 82 
Syrophcenician, 143, 156 

Teaching of Jesus, Esp. 111- 

136: 
Manner of, 103 f., 114 ff., 

185 f. 
Originality of, 20 f., 111- 

114 
On Character, 130 
On Covetousness, 131 
On Doing God's Will, 

129 f. 
On Duties, Religious, 129 
On End of the World, 

131 f- 
On Faith, 122 
On Forgiveness, 122 
On God, 117 ff., 126 
On Grace, 102 f. 
On Independence, Spir- 
itual, 125 
On Inner Life, 124 
On the Kingdom. See 

Kingdom 
On Love, 122, 126 ff. 
On Man, 125 

On the New Life, 121-135 
On Religion, 102 f . 
On Repentance, 121, 123 
On Righteousness, 121 
On Salvation, 123 
On Service, 128 
On Social Attitude, 130 
On the State, 131 
On Truth, 124 f. 



On Wealth, 13 iff. 

On World-renunciation, 

132 ff. 
Temptation of Jesus, 38, 65-68, 

204 f. 
Tradition, Scribal, 104 f. 
Tribute-money, 93 f. 
Triumphal Entry, 37, 92 f. 
Truth, 124 f. 
Twelve, The, 151 ff. 
Two-nature Theory, 41 ff. 

Universal Man, Jesus, 199 f., 

216 
Universality of Kingdom, 156 f. 
Universality of Jesus' Ministry, 

140-143, 174 
Unselfishness of Jesus, 176 ff., 

203 

Vicarious Suffering, 148 
Victory, Final, 161 f., 165, 

170 f. 
View of Future of his Work, 

149-165 
Vitality of Jesus, 164, 189 ff. 

Wealth, 131 ff. 

"Why hast Thou Forsaken 

Me?"i46ff. 
Wisdom of Jesus, 178-188 
Work of Jesus, 137-149 
World-renunciation, 132 ff. 

Zealots, 27 f., 34, 61 f., 78 f., 
93 f. 



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